A ballet director didn’t like this critic’s review. So he attacked her with dog feces | CBC Radio

A night at the ballet turned into a nightmare for Wiebke Huester when the director confronted her during intermission and smeared dog feces in her face.

Huester, a dance critic for Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, was crossing the foyer at the Hannover State Opera House on Saturday, when ballet director Marco Goecke confronted her about a negative review she’d written about his work. 

What began as a “normal conversation” took a turn, she says, when Goecke suddenly slapped her with an open bag of excrement and “brutally, violently” rubbed it in her face

“It was a nightmare. It was so horrible,” Huester told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “I was so shocked, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. I screamed, and then I started crying.”

Goecke has been suspended from his post as ballet chief. He has since apologized for what he called his “disgraceful act,” but also further criticized Huester’s work and asked for “a certain understanding at least for the reasons why this happened.”

Huester says she has also filed a criminal complaint, and Goecke faces an investigation on suspicion of bodily harm and slander.

Threatens to ban her from performances

During the intermission for Faith – Hope – Love on Saturday, Huester says Geocke approached her and demanded to know what she was doing there. She says she told him she intended to review the performance.

That’s when he started talking about her most recent review of his production of Dutch Mountain at the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague, and said she should be banned from the opera house for what she wrote.

“Of course, you cannot exclude the free press from a performance just because, before, you have received a not-so-good review,” she said.

“I thought it rather childish of him to say something like that. So I decided, in order not to make him angry … not to comment on that.”

The conversation continued for awhile, she said, before taking a sudden turn.

“In the very moment I didn’t even see the movement he made with his arm. But he must have grabbed up this dog poo bag out of his … pocket,” she said.

After shoving it in her face, she says he threw the bag to the ground and stormed away. Only then did she fully realize what had happened. 

“All these people around me were in shock, and they were just, you know, looking at me, not knowing what to do, not knowing what was wrong with this strange woman,” she said. “And it’s quite a silly thing to say, but I felt like a child completely abandoned, humiliated. You know, I didn’t know what to do.”

After the opera house’s press officer whisked her away to a private bathroom to clean up, Huester says she got her wits about her and immediately called her husband, who is the editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“I want this in the paper … so that everybody knows what he did,” she said. “That was so extremely important to me at that very moment.”

Then she called the police, she said, and then she went home. 

Apology issued, but not accepted

In a statement posted to its website on Monday, the opera house said it contacted Huester immediately to apologize for the “unspeakable” violation of her “personal integrity,” and that Goecke’s “impulsive reaction” violated the theatre’s rules and “caused massive damage” to its reputation. 

The theatre said it had suspended Goecke and banned him from the premises “until further notice,” and called on him to apologize “before further steps are announced.”

On Tuesday, Goeke issued an statement of his own.

“I would like to apologize sincerely to all concerned, first and foremost to Ms. Huester, for my absolutely unacceptable act,” it reads. “In retrospect, I am clearly aware that this was a disgraceful act in the heat of the moment and an overreaction.”

But he added that it’s time for media to “rethink a certain form of destructive and hurtful reporting that damages the whole cultural sector” and criticized Huester for what he said were “often nasty reviews.”

“I apologize for the fact that I finally blew my top, but I also ask for a certain understanding at least for the reasons why this happened,” he said.

Huester says Goeke’s apology was no apology at all. 

“He’s trying to create the legend that I have been torturing him for 20 years with my bad reviews … and this is not true,” she said. 

“He tries to play it down by saying this was an impulsive act. Please believe me, it was not because you don’t normally walk around a theatre with an open dog poop bag in your pocket that is filled, right?”

Goecke has said his elderly dachshund had defecated earlier, and he had packed the mess into a bag and had been planning to dispose of it.

Standing by the bad review

The ballet critic’s newspaper, and the German journalists’ association DJV, both denounced the attack, which they characterized as an assault on press freedom. 

Huester, meanwhile, stands by her most recent review, which praised some of Goeke’s artistic choices, but ultimately concluded his show was “boring” and “disjointed.”

“I thought it wasn’t a good piece, and I wrote this in an article,” she said.