“What is your last step, before you are eaten by the darkness?“, Marco Goecke asks a dancer during the rehearsals of his piece SUPERNOVA which had its world premiere on February 25th 2009 with Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam. In this choreography with its only three female and four male dancers Goecke’s main interest is the becoming, emergence and disappearance of movement and light in the micro-cosmos of the stage.

A supernova is the bright illumination of a star exploding at the end of its lifetime and thereby destroying itself. For quite a while Marco Goecke has been taking interest in identifying the border between what still exists and what already has disappeared. The lighting for his pieces, which he always develops together with the designer Udo Haberland – this characteristic light design has become something like a brand mark of Goecke’s work – might be interpreted as a metaphor for the indecidability between seeing and not seeing, existing and disappearing. In SUPERNOVA this contrasts have been augmented into an extreme by using very slow fade outs of the lighting.
Goecke never contents himself with what exists. He is searching for the invisible, the dark side of the moon, the extreme. This is not only noticeable in titles of former pieces such as “Alles”, which means “Everything” or “Nichts” which means “Nothing”, but mainly in his movement language. He is always searching for something new and wants to make the impossible possible. He quotes Albert Einstein who said the only good thing about time is the fact that not everything happens at the same time. But Goecke takes the physicist’s statement as a provocation to suspend the laws of physics: “In this scene everything should happen at once. Can you do this thousand times faster, so that it hardly exists in the end because it is so fast”, he advices a dancer, who then accelerates her already speedy solo.
In SUPERNOVA the choreographer, who often positions his dancers with their backs towards the audience, experiments with other unusual outlooks: he moves one Pas de Deux into the horizontal and even shows the same Pas de Deux from two different perspectives.
As usually, movement is in the foreground and décor reduced to some elemental props: salt, air and fire. One dancer holds a match in his hand which is about to burn up. “I love this little bit of life”, says Goecke, while he concentrates on the last glow of this little disappearing star. Until the only thing left is darkness.

Nadja Kadel

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