Micha van Hoecke, ‘don’t leave me, stay close to me’, the last words to his wife Miki

“Don’t leave me, stay close to me.” These are the last words spoken to his wife Miki Matsuse, a few days before his death by Micha van Hoecke, the great Belgian choreographer and director who died Saturday night at the hospital in Massa. With the very young Miki Matsuse, a Japanese dancer, they met in Tokyo in 1985 during an internship, after two years she joined his Ensemble becoming, in a very short time, one of the stars of the company, interpreter and muse, intense, lyrical , dramatic. Subsequently Miki Matsuse becomes the assistant, the choreographer help, the maitre de ballet, the one who has always reassembled, often in tandem with Yoko Wakabayashi, all the shows of Micha van Hoecke. Opera, opera, theater, ballet, an iron memory, a tireless and disciplined artist, indispensable and irreplaceable to the work of the creator. “We got together in 1987 and only got married in 2012 at Castello Pasquini in Castiglioncello where the company was based- Miki Matsuse told Adnkronos- We thought about it for a while. Micha was the story of dance – he added – A dance expression of man and his humanity, total theater, without borders between the arts, pure beauty. My task now – he announced – is to carry on Micha’s repertoire, to make it known to the new generations, a heritage that it will continually need to be enlivened and represented “. On the horizon, the birth of a Foundation dedicated to the deceased master, and the acquisition by an important national body of his precious archive.