Famend multi-hyphenate dance and theater artist Lynne Taylor-Corbett died on January 12, 2025, at age 78. For many years, her presence within the dance, musical theater, and leisure industries was substantial and continually evolving. She tailor-made her motion fashion to ballet corporations, fashionable dance teams, Broadway reveals, hit films, and commercials. The by means of line in her diversified work is an undercurrent of pleasure and humanity—of not taking something too severely.
Taylor-Corbett was born and raised in Denver, considered one of six sisters. She was first launched to bop by means of her mom, who performed piano for native ballet courses. At 17, Taylor-Corbett moved to New York Metropolis to attend the College of American Ballet. (Whereas finding out, she labored as an usher at what was then referred to as the New York State Theater, the Lincoln Heart residence of New York Metropolis Ballet.) In 1967, she joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with which she carried out for 2 seasons. Over time she additionally danced in a number of Broadway reveals, together with Guarantees, Guarantees and A Refrain Line, the place she was an understudy for Cassie.
Finally she started experimenting with choreography. She shortly discovered that whereas technical excellence was essential, the sensation of the motion mattered most to her. “I noticed I used to be to work from my sensations in my dance, slightly than from mirror photos,” she mentioned in an interview with Dance Journal in 1976. “I’m not terrified of my picture as a dancer. It’s simply one thing I discover pleasure in, not one thing I hold my ego on.” Her seek for an natural high quality inside motion led her to create works that emphasised storytelling, humor, and absurdity, whereas additionally holding tightly to musicality and approach.
In 1972 she turned considered one of 5 founding members of Theatre Dance Assortment, an ensemble that created extremely theatrical items mixing all of these components. As her repute grew, she started to obtain a gradual circulate of fee requests and job presents from varied corners of the leisure world. Maybe the highest-profile was 1984’s Footloose—her thrashy, angsty motion for star Kevin Bacon turned immediately iconic. In ballet, she developed a detailed relationship with Carolina Ballet, and created or set items for American Ballet Theatre, New York Metropolis Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Miami Metropolis Ballet. She choreographed seven Broadway reveals, together with Chess, Titanic, and 1999’s Swing!, for which she acquired Tony nominations for her choreography and course. She taught courses everywhere in the nation, continued to work continuously in movie and tv, and lent her strikes to commercials and industrials for quite a lot of manufacturers.
She loved working with actors who didn’t have any dance coaching, and utilizing motion to unlock a extra kinetic vitality in a efficiency. “My very own private excessive is working with wildly numerous performers who fill me with inspiration,” she wrote in a 1991essay for this journal. In a subsequent profile, in 1997, she mentioned, “I wish to report on what I’m seeing. If I’ve a contribution to make, it’s a view of what’s occurring round me. It’s additionally a extra deeply felt impression of what’s in me.”
Within the last years of her life, Taylor-Corbett and her son Shaun co-wrote a musical, Distant Thunder, telling the story of a person who was taken from his native Blackfeet tribe as a toddler. It premiered at A.R.T./New York Theatres final fall with course and choreography by Taylor-Corbett.
In a collection of social media posts about their final days collectively, Shaun recounted dancing within the hospital room together with his mom. “She danced with the identical pleasure and abandon she all the time had since she was a younger lady,” he wrote. “She maintained a childlike innocence and pleasure for the world that by no means diminished.”
