Marco Goecke

When contemporary dance is Sturm und Drang

Text by Valeria Crippa

Abysses and peaks, cones of shadow and blades of light, popularity and scandal. From his earliest beginnings as a choreographer, Marco Goecke has struggled between opposites, not only in the aesthetics of his work-a substantial body of some ninety titles conceived for a wide range of international companies-but in the very essence of his own artistic creativity. He has never made a secret of it: "The engine of my work is anguish; it can become a source of hope. What I try to do with the fast movements of my vocabulary is to make anxiety visible and palpable in order to transform it into beauty. Running away from the body, running away from one's own limits," he confessed already in the documentary Thin Skin, made from Manon Lichtved and Bas Westerhof in 2016, which delved into the obsessions of the German choreographer, whose face is perpetually hidden from dark glasses worn even in the rehearsal room to defend himself not only from too inquisitive gazes, but also from disembodied presences whose disturbing presence the restless Marco, now 50, senses. Hounded from a hypersensitive and torn soul, Goecke approached theater as young as 14, in a youth marked from panic attacks and saved by the miracle of his own precocious talent. His birth (on April 12, 1972) in Pina Bausch's city-symbol, Wuppertal, seemed to have destined him inevitably for the Tanztheater, whose moods are nevertheless imbued in the vast production of this choreographer, who nevertheless wanted to model his very personal language on the classical-academic code. Goecke's choreographic sign is incisive, aggressive to to the point of being violent, fast to to become fibrillating, albeit veined with a surprising counter-song of intimate, vulnerable sensuality. His nervous, vibratory dance etches the space like a laser that rips through the darkness of often dimly lit sets and paths, as if accidentally, from miscellaneous objects, feathers, dead leaves and rose petals, thrown from dancers flaunting hyperbolic bodies and muscular and phonic tics, tremors and virtuosity.  

A kind of storm and rush of dance, as if the chiaroscuros of the late 18th-century Sturm und Drang movement stretched shadows and glimmers from German Romanticism to the contemporary world of this workaholic and controversial auteur-removed in recent months from his post as director of the Hanover Staatsballett over the scandal of his assault to a German journalist, whose dark, magmatic choreographic matter began to bubbling and emerging at the beginning of the new millennium, with 2000's Loch, his first work for the Hanover Choreographic Competition, followed from Chicks, Demigods and Ring Them Bells for the Stuttgarter Ballett. Goecke has been to long resident choreographer of the Stuttgart Ballet and Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam, of Gauthier Dance, associate author of Nederlands Dans Theater, a company to to which he is deeply attached, having studied in Holland from as a young man; he has received commissions from many international companies such as Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, the Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris, the Vienna Ballet, the Norwegian National Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet Seattle, the Ballet of the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, the Staatsballett Berlin, the Hamburg Ballet, the Zurich Ballet, the Ballet of the Bayerische Staatsoper and the Companhia de Dança of São Paulo, Brazil. In 2004 Pina Bausch invited him to the Tanztheater Festival with two works, Blushing and Mopey, and two years later his Nutcracker was revived from ZDFtheaterkanal. Many of his choreographies have entered the repertoire of other companies, such as Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Canadian National Ballet Toronto, Finnish National Ballet Helsinki, Stanislavsky Theater Moscow, Ballett Zürich, Australian Ballet and Ballett der Deutschen Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf. Also escorted to the rehearsal hall by his faithful dachshund Gustav, Goecke has received numerous international awards, including the Prix Dom Perignon in 2003, the Baden-Württemberg State Cultural Award in 2005, the Nijinski Award in 2005, and the Dutch Dance Prize Zwaan in 2017. Called in 2023 from Die Welt "the most important German choreographer," he was to long awarded by the trade press and elected, in 2017 and 2021, "author of the year" in Tanz magazine's international critics' poll, awarded the Kylian Ring and German Dance Prize in 2022. Among his many choreographies, it is worth dwelling at least on the award-winning Nijinski, created in 2016 for Gauthier Dance to Stuttgart and particularly beloved by Italian audiences also because it is interpreted, in the title role, by Neapolitan dancer Rosario Guerra: a work that follows the biographical path, oscillating between talent and madness, of the ballet myth of the early 20th century.  

The title Dark Matter, chosen for the triptych that Festival dei Due Mondi will present in its national premiere on July 7 and 8 at Teatro Romano, is emblematic and refers back to to Dark Matter: Choreographies of Marco Goecke, the monographic volume to dedicated to him by playwright Nadia Kadel (published in 2016 from Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg) that testifies to his artistic activity. On the same track, the Dark Matter evening gathers a cross-section of Goecke's creative world, declined in three different choreographies - Tué, Midnight Raga and Whiteout -, which present a crescendo format, from the female solo of the first title, to the male duo of the second, to the choral composition for nine dancers of the third. Tué (Killed) is the third piece composed by the choreographer for Les Ballets de Monte Carlo: originally created for dancer Bernice Coppieters on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, it was presented in 2009 in honor of Princess Caroline of Monaco, who was honored at the Grimaldi Forum for her support of the art of Tersicore. The solo, which has Spoleto will be performed from Maude Sabourin, dialogues with the amber voice of chansonnière Barbara, whose desperate intensity and neuroses she embodies. Midnight Raga,a male duo danced by Italian Rosario Guerra (the interpreter of Nijinski) and from Louis Steinmetz of the Staatsballett Hannover, springs instead from the hypnotic sitar of Ravi Shankar in Raga Puriya-Dhanashri Gat in Sawarital: the raga of Indian music is a basic melodic structure that here takes on, even in the blue silk of the costumes, the color of night. An oriental night into which creeps the blues voice of American Etta James: in I'd Rather Go Blind she sings that she would rather be blind than see her lover's betrayal. Finally, it's Bob Dylan to get Whiteout off the ground with unexpected lightness, inspired to Le visage de la Paix by French poet Paul Eluard ("I know all the places where the dove dwells/and the most natural is the head of man (...)Let the human face know/the usefulness of beauty under the wing of reflection") for nine dancers from Ballett Saarbrücken. But Goecke warns, "There is no need to understand dance from top to bottom, one cannot understand everything, that would be boring. Better to let what you see to slide on a deeper level. I have created so many pieces that I think there is a connection between them, the choreographies follow me like ghosts, good or bad ghosts. When I go to to sleep, I check under the bed for something or someone. I always fear a specter behind the curtain."

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