Marco Goecke completed his ballet training in 1988 at the Heinz-Bosl-Stiftung ballet academy in Munich as well as at the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague, where he received his diploma in 1995. Engagements followed at the Berlin State Opera and Theater Hagen. It was in the year 2000 at this theatre that Goecke created his first choreography, entitled Loch. There followed several choreographies for the Noverre-Society with dancers from the Stuttgart Ballet, and an invitation to the New York Choreographic Institute. In July 2003 Goecke won the Prix Dom Pérignon in Hamburg with the piece Blushing, danced by the Stuttgart Ballet. In the years that followed, he received numerous commissions for international companies such as Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, the Norwegian National Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle and the Berlin State Ballet.
In the 2005/2006 season Marco Goecke was appointed Choreographer in Residence at the Stuttgart Ballet, and it was there in December 2006 that he created his first narrative ballet The Nutcracker, which was later also filmed for the ZDF theatre channel. From 2006 to 2012 Goecke also held the post of Choreographer in Residence at the Scapino Ballet in Rotterdam. Since the 2013/2014 season he has been Associate Choreographer at the renowned Nederlands Dans Theater.
Of the over sixty works Goecke has created in just a few years, many are also performed by companies for whom they were not originally created, for example in Tel Aviv, in Sao Paulo, by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, by the Canadian National Ballet, by the Ballett-Theater in Munich, by the Finnish National Ballet in Helsinki, by the Stanislavsky Theater in Moscow, by the Zurich Ballet, by the German Opera on the Rhine in Düsseldorf, and by the Vienna State Opera.
