Marco Goecke, whose choreographies make unusual feelings visible in bodies

THE BIG CRYING ©Rahi Rezvani

The bare-chested man stands in the front and center of the stage with his back to the audience. In the background of the stage, a long thin pipe with a shaky but powerful fire emanating from the end is positioned on the same axis as the man. From the darkness in the back, male and female dancers wearing black clothes are swiftly coming forward from either side of the pipe. They and the man consult with each other with harsh, intermittent and fast repetitive gestures, exchanging mutual movements. It's like a farewell ritual; They say goodbye to him, as if taking a piece of him, or a memory with him. But it could also be an initiation or a creation ceremony; Perhaps others are getting the blessing of that bare-chested man to be born, to live, to continue to live, or to be accepted as adults. On the other hand, in a later scene and at the end of the work he is on his knees on the floor, his face leaning towards the ground, with his mouth opens wide but does not make a sound. Even if it is watched on the screen, the feeling of pain that is difficult to describe with words passes to the other side. The sound that does not come out of his mouth that is as if opening to hell, turns into the chilling screams of 18 dancers in another scene of the piece. That's when the immaterial sense of pain and terror almost materializes and covers our whole body. How would we experience this scene, which gives me goosebumps even while watching it in the screen, if we physically would share the place where those screams were let out. Of all the shows I've watched online over the last year, this must be the moment and the whole work as well, that impressed me the most.

The dramaturg of the piece describes The Big Crying as Goecke’s the most personal work since the creation process began right after the death of his father in fall 2020. Like every extraordinary creation, it is not only limited to the origins and personal experiences of its creator, it also expands and becomes universal with us watching it. Especially when we consider all the additional sufferings, losses, and desperation the people of the world have experienced due to the pandemic for more than a year, it is not only of Goecke’s and his father’s that turns into a scream but of all of us, in The Big Crying.

THE BIG CRYING ©Rahi Rezvani

Goecke's choice of music was just as extraordinary as his use of creepy human screams in different tones and heights. When I look at the program booklet after the show, the parts of the harrowing and unsettling sound landscape that I think are produced from industrial sounds exclusively for this piece, are Rorogwela's Death Lullaby and Electricity's Indlela Yababi from the 1997 album Extreme Music from Africa. The songs that intervene in this purgatory and noisy sound landscape belonged to Tori Amos, who creates a violent and fragile eccentricity with her voice and her lyrics that Goecke creates with the bodies of the dancers.

The Big Crying was the first of two world premieres that Marco Goecke staged last March. It was streamed live in NDT 2’s programme titled Souls made apparent alongside the year 2002 piece 27'52 by the legendary choreographer Jiří Kylián, artistic director of NDT for nearly a quarter century. 

For those who would like not to miss this extraordinary piece of Goecke, there will be a live stream, titled We haven't said enough, on April 20-21-22, 2021, which NDT 2 added to its program as an extra. Johan Inger's piece IMPASSE, staged for the company in March 2020 will accompany Goecke's piece.

THE BIG CRYING ©Rahi Rezvani

Born in 1972 in Wuppertal, Goecke has never been taught by the world-famous choreographer Pina Bausch, the first to come to mind when talking about Wuppertal. In Thin Skin, the 2016 documentary about him, he mentions that he went to the opera for the first time at the age of 14 with the school and says that he saw the ballet education he received in Munich as an opportunity to escape from Wuppertal. Goecke never leaves his sausage dog, Gustav, who stays always in its black bag with the lid open on the ground beside him, whether it is a rehearsal, tour or television shoot. Even his first work for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2019, Dogs Sleep is inspired by Gustav.

Goecke has become one of Europe's rising choreographers especially in the last 10 years. He started his career by creating pieces for Scapino Ballet Rotterdam, and gained fame with those. In addition to many other awards, Goecke received the prestigious Prix Nijinsky in 2006, was nominated twice for the Dutch dance award Zwaan for his work for NDT, once won, and was awarded in 2015 by the renowned German magazine TANZ as The Choreographer of the Year evaluating his artistic development in the past decade. In addition to NDT, Goecke regularly works with the world's leading dance companies such as Ballets de Monte Carlo, São Paulo Companhia de Dança, Ballett Zürich and Pacific Northwest Ballet (Seattle).

Goecke, who has made more than 60 pieces, is one of the few choreographers who created his own unique movement design, quality and vocabulary in today's contemporary dance world. When you watch one of his pieces, it’s impossible not to recognize him. He creates a very unique world on the stage and does it almost exclusively with movement design. Goecke's choreographic aesthetic is mostly made up of everyday gestures being broken down into small pieces and then put back together again, as if obsessed, angry or anxious, and repeated quickly. Goecke skillfully uses gestures and human sounds to create a distinctive and unique language of movement that allows a completely new look at the human body. The general aesthetics of his works consist of dancer figures with their hairs glued with brilliantine and parted sharply from the side, with dark-colored trousers as costumes, men tops usually left naked, and of extraordinary musical choices accompanying them. Goecke needs neither complicated lighting designs, video footage, nor gigantic, rotating, rising, falling, spilling, gushing stage designs in his works. Goecke generally takes the stage space as an emptiness and fills it with emotional spheres created by the unusual movements of the bodies.

DER LIEBHABER ©Ralf Mohr

Goecke's second work, which recently made its world premiere, is Der Liebhaber (The Lover). It is the first new all-night work Goecke staged with the Hannover State Ballet (Staatsballett Hannover) of which he has been the general art director since the 2019/20 season. It was due to premiere in spring a year ago, but was postponed to this season due to the pandemic, as expected. When the theaters in Germany could not be opened this winter due to the new wave of the pandemic, the work made its world premiere on February 27, 2021, as a livestream from the stage, after an intense rehearsal process, which was kept under control with the covid tests conducted for the whole company and employees three times a week, as Goecke requested.

Der Liebhaber is an adaptation of the famous 1984 novel of the same name, known to contain autobiographical elements of Marguerite Duras. Goecke said that since his youth he had read it many times, and he was even more interested in Duras when his psychologist back then described her as a "Drunk, pathological creature".

DER LIEBHABER ©Ralf Mohr

While transforming Duras' novel into a choreographic narrative, Goecke does not convey the story exactly, but deals with the emotions, situations and figures contained in it. In the first ten minutes of the 70-minute work, solos, duos and ensemble dances, accompanied by sounds and traditional music from the streets of Indochina of the 1930s (modern-day Vietnam), prepare us for the sense of the place and time of the story, independent of its protagonists. After these 10 minutes, when we first see the protagonist of the story, a 15-year-old poor French girl wearing a man's hat, on the stage, we also begin to hear Debussy's famous work La Mer. Goecke's music selection is again unique. Apart from the importance of the water element, the river and the sea in the novel, La Mer, which also includes Far Eastern inspirations, accompanies the choreography, which skillfully conveys first the emerging of sexuality in the girl in waves, then the wave of passion that began to develop between her and the rich Chinese man older than her as they first meet and move side by side in the same direction. Much later, in the pas de deux which Goecke placed in the second half of the work, which I think is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary of its kind in the history of dance, we watch the sensual lovemaking that surges the souls of the couple in a rather abstract interpretation. This scene is accompanied again by an interesting, little-known music piece, Lili Boulanger's composition D’un soir triste. Goecke only tells about the sexual intercourse between the two in this single intensive scene throughout the work, as if he is paying tribute to the fact that Duras did not like Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1992 film adaptation of the novel focused on lust. Unlike Annaud's adaptation, Goecke’s elaborates on the emotional tensions between all the characters in the novel, sometimes woven with passion, sometimes with anger, sometimes with longing, sometimes with fear. Therefore, not only between the girl and her Chinese lover, but also her psychologically unstable mother, her angry older brother, her melancholic brother, her girlfriend in the dormitory and the authoritarian father of her Chinese lover are the dominant figures of this adaptation. In doing so, Goecke does not tell events in a straight line, such as the fragmented narrative of the novel, but focuses on people and their emotions rather than events, taking the risk that the audience will have trouble following the multi-person story that can be considered complicated for a ballet/dance performance format.

DER LIEBHABER ©Ralf Mohr

In a recent interview Goecke states: "Nothingness catches my interest. As soon as I do any choreography, I want it to disappear immediately…”. However, I’m sure that Goecke's adaptation of Duras’s novel will not disappear so easily. In my opinion, when theaters reopen and companies start touring, Der Liebhaber probably will receive offers from all over the world. For those who do not want to wait until then to watch this strong and unique adaptation, livestreams are announced for a small ticket price on April 18, 2021 on the Hannover State Ballet website.

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[The Turkish version of this article is published on unlimited.]