The man died bitterly poor, but posthumously he received all kinds of honors. In the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, Oscar Wilde’s monumental tomb towers over the sepulchral landscape: a monolith with a stone sphinx appliqué, hard and delicate at the same time. This is exactly how Hanover’s ballet director Marco Goecke created his piece “A Wilde Story”: seventy-five minutes about the poet and dandy who has experienced and suffered everything that should finally disappear into historical oblivion in the age of LGBTQIA+. Namely discrimination, exclusion, punishment. Wilde loved men and women. But the Victorian virtue terror harassed him until he ended up behind bars. The imprisonment not only cost him his artistic reputation and his economic livelihood, it also brought about his physical ruin. How can this be told on the dance stage?
By giving Marco Goecke a free hand. To a certain extent, the fifty-year-old is the auteur among contemporary choreographers: a dance calligrapher with an unmistakable handwriting, a signature that is as elegant as it is erratic, which inspires and inspires his iconic creations. The native of Wuppertal recently accepted the German Dance Prize, the highest award in the category. A long overdue honor. The approximately eighty works that the choreographer has created for national and international companies within two decades document his virtuoso handling of literary, musical and biographical material. In addition, they stand for an extremely sophisticated (and performatively hard to spell) dance language.
Marco Goecke, ballet director at the Staatstheater Hannover and winner of the German Dance Prize 2022.
(Photo: Regina Brocke)
Goecke dissects movement, he detaches it from the organic flow and rhythmizes it along audible gasps of breath. Its aesthetic exaggerates the idiom of classical dance and accelerates it to the maximum. It is only logical that the viewer’s perception should also start to skid. Sparkling impressions, kinetic webs – and the feeling of atmospheric concentration stick with you.
As with the dancer portrait “Nijinski” (2016), Goecke also blasts “A Wild Story” at the Hanover State Opera the biographical framework to describe the fatal contradiction between the individual search for happiness and social commentary. In eleven pictures he collages the life and work of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) into a manic journey into darkness. Every now and then an axis of light breaks open, or pastel shimmers à la Lyonel Feininger powder the arcades in the background of the stage. Before that, the fabulous State Ballet stitches scenic particles from the poet’s life together: marriage and literary success, the liaison with Lord Alfred Douglas, finally social ostracism, accusation and conviction due to homosexual relationships.
Rosario Guerra (left) and Conal Francis-Martin (as Oscar Wilde) in “A Wilde Story”.
(Photo: Bettina Stoess)
Goecke intersperses excerpts from Wilde’s artful fairy tales, poems and the “Portrait of Dorian Gray”. A fairy tale like “The Happy Prince” from 1888 focuses on the pauperism of post-industrialization and practices historical class and social criticism. Goecke’s interpretation focuses on the present. His danced version reflects the desire to preserve prosperity and the thwarting of democratic participation. The eternally beautiful, eternally young “Portrait of Dorian Gray” from Wilde’s pen also seems made for the 21st century: triumph of egomania, self-optimization mania and a merciless wrinkle-free cult.
Ultimately, it comes down to the question: What is love all about?
Instead of separating fact from fiction, Marco Goecke nests and interlocks the fate and artistic fantasies of his title hero (brilliant: Conal Francis-Martin). He stages a hermetic art world that ultimately revolves around the question: What is love all about? The choreographer answers them unequivocally: attraction, devotion, eroticism, sex – all well and good. But in the depths of our souls we remain prisoners of loneliness. Passionate kisses, mutual masturbation and caresses – all of this comforts Goecke and does not hide the fact that only two monads touch each other. Albeit fueled by late-romantic furor of sound from the orchestra pit.
Marco Goecke’s “A Wilde Story” is a hit that professes to be fragmentary, provisional, unfinished, utopian. To the dream of absolute love that breaks in reality. And an addiction to norm control that to this day arbitrarily distinguishes between wrong and right. “A Wilde Story” is the best possible dance plea against it.