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The "drunk, pathological creature" he was advised against was of course of particular interest to him.

This is how the very young Marco Goecke found his way to the French novelist Marguerite Duras.

In her self-assessment book “Writing” he also stumbled across many analogies to his way of finding movement and choreographing.

Now the affinity has become a task.

Goecke is bringing out “Lover” in Hanover as a full-length dance drama - her late, most famous novel from 1984, interwoven with her own experiences from her childhood in French-colonized Indochina, about the love of a 15-year-old for an older Chinese.

Although he now says himself: “I'm not as dizzy as I used to be.” Marco Goecke quickly distances himself from his creations.

The premiere was supposed to take place in Hanover last April, in the middle of his first season as head of ballet at the Lower Saxony State Theater.

Now it has been postponed almost a year.

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Back then, at the beginning of the first lockdown, Marco Goecke had just finished dancing a few minutes.

As always with him, the concept only really takes on concrete contours in the rehearsal room.

He doesn't like to tinker with too much beforehand, instead he draws excessively.

Then he prefers to play in medias res, surrounded and inspired by his dancers.

That shouldn't be, Corona owed it.

The Duras novelty was thwarted, Hanover initially deprived of a presumed highlight and the German dance year deprived of an important premiere.

But the - temporary - failure was an opportunity for the otherwise scrupulous, 49-year-old from Wuppertal, who was almost 49 years old in his first really responsible job (after many years in Stuttgart as resident choreographer).

Free of major creative obligations, he created a full evening filler for his old friend Eric Gautier and his independent troupe at the Stuttgart Theaterhaus in October 2020: “Do you love Gershwin?” It turned out to be a stroke of luck, a thoughtful, cheerful, versatile piece that made the great composers brought a little bit of the swing glamor of the Twenties into today.

Various guest performances were planned, they have all been postponed.

Like birds in front of the Vietnamese sea: scene from Marco Goecke's "The Lover"

Source: Ralf Mohr

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And now Marco Goecke is sitting there and providing information for an introductory stream about his world premiere, which can only be seen online for the time being.

As always, all in black, pale, keeping a distance through dark sunglasses, but amiable.

And of course the black and brown dachshund Gustav, who was the inspiration for Herrchen's first creation at the Paris Opéra called "Dogs sleep" in 2019 and who has already dined with Princess Caroline in Monte-Carlo, lies at his feet in his naturally black box.

"The Duras is so mysterious, you read it, but it is blurred and watered down, there are so few facts," says Marco Goecke in his flippant Westphalian way. He wants to set himself apart from the eroticism of the film, which Duras was angry at: “Nothing fascinates me.

The moment I choreograph something, I want it to disappear again. "

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There is Vietnamese local color on the Mekong in front of the stage-filled waves, the end takes place in Paris.

Marko Goecke has chosen music from Vietnam as background music, but also works by Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Gabriel Fauré.

And of course, the production pictures already reveal, there are Goecke signature moments again.

They are: a mostly dark room;

dark costumes;

the men often with a bare upper body, in order to make Goecke's shimmering, powerful, often bird-like arm movements very directly visible as muscle play.

Despite this apparent limitation, the Goecke minimalism established early on, there is a great deal of variance possible.

You have allowed the German to mature into an internationally sought-after choreographer not only from Monaco to Amsterdam and from Seattle to Sao Paulo, with a steadily growing catalog of works of well over 60 pieces.

Despite their very specific abstraction, the Goecke works can be very concrete action-oriented.

In his surreal and complex Stuttgart “Nutcracker” from 2006, for example, or four years later in the confident Virginia Woolf adaptation “Orlando” for the exceptional dancer Friedemann Vogel, which plays with the binary.

Tremendous, sensually vibrating tension

A huge success - with the Stuttgart Gautier Ensemble - was “Nijinski” in 2016, which Goecke brought out revised in winter 2019 in its first season in Hanover.

And again the Goecke language cast its spell: through looks and reduced-nervous gestures, it creates a tremendous, sensually vibrating tension.

The curiosity and passion, also the horror and the lust, Goecke succeeds, although he tells so concretely, at the same time to emphasize the timeless, universally valid of his characters.

A first three-part series with three world premieres (including one of its own) was then achieved in Goeckes due to the pandemic of the inaugural season that was canceled.

With the evening “We'll meet again” he contributed to the quickly improvised summer open air program of the garden theater in the Herrenhausen Gardens.

And in the second lockdown, a second, new three-part series called “Rastlos” was streamed.

Thanks to testing three times a week, the Goecke-Pas-de-deux in “The Lover” are now “as human and as intimate as I can”.

This seemingly loner arrived in Hanover very collectively, but he still keeps his distance.

And with all the pandemic-related restrictions, he has already managed to make his youthful, vital company stand out as one of the most interesting in Germany thanks to a clever repertoire policy.

Marco Goecke's “The Lover” will be streamed in real time on February 27th at 7.30 pm on Staatstheater-hannover.de and will then be available for free for 30 days.