Marco Goecke

Biography

Marco Goecke studied at the Ballettakademie within the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung in Munich, graduating in 1988, as well as at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in The Hague, receiving a diploma in 1995. After completing his education, he was engaged at the Staatsoper Berlin and the Theater Hagen, where in 2000 he created his very first choreography, titled Loch. He subsequently conceived works for the Stuttgarter Ballett’s Noverre society, and was invited to the New York Choreographic Institute. In July 2003, Goecke won the Prix Dom Pérignon in Hamburg for his piece Blushing, performed by the Stuttgarter Ballett. Over the next few years, he received numerous commissions from companies worldwide, including Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, the Norwegian National Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet Seattle and the Staatsballett Berlin.

In the 2005/06 season, Goecke was named resident choreographer of the Stuttgarter Ballett, for which in December 2006 he created his first story ballet, The Nutcracker, which was later on filmed by the ZDFtheaterkanal. From 2006 to 2012, he was resident choreographer of the Scapino Ballet Rotterdam. In 2013, he was appointed associate choreographer at the Nederlands Dans Theater in The Hague. Between 2019 and 2023, Goecke was artist in residence at the Gauthier Dance in Stuttgart, while concurrently holding the post of director of the Staatsballett Hannover.

Many of the over 90 works Goecke has created within a mere couple of decades have also been staged by companies that did not actually commission them, e.g. in Tel Aviv and Sao Paulo, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, the National Ballet of Canada, Ballett-Theater München, Finnish National Ballet in Helsinki, Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre in Moscow, Ballett Zürich, Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf and Wiener Staatsoper.

Goecke has received a number of prestigious international accolades, among them the Culture Prize of Baden- Württemberg (2005), the Nijinsky Award in Monte Carlo (2006), the Choreographer of the Year from the critics’ survey of Tanz magazine (2015), the Netherlands’ Zwaan and Italy’s Danzadanza for the Best Choreography of the Year (2017). His 2016 feature-length ballet Nijinsky, for the Gauthier Dance in Stuttgart, has been performed to great acclaim on tours all over the world. In 2018, his piece Wir sagen uns Dunkles (We Tell Each Other Dark Stuff), made for the NDT, was nominated for the Prix Benois. In 2022, Goecke received two coveted accolades, the Jiří Kylián Ring and the Deutscher Tanzpreis. An insight into his illustrious career and oeuvre is provided in the book Dark Matter (Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2016).

In recent years, Goecke has been lauded for the 2022 full-length piece A Wilde Story (about Oscar Wilde, for the Staatsballett Hannover) and the 2023 feature In the Dutch Mountains (for the Nederlands Dans Theater), in particular.