By Alex Williams
Lynne Taylor-Corbett, a Tony Award-nominated choreographer and director whose varied career included the film Footloose, has died in New York, aged 78.
Her career included commissions for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre as well as Broadway musicals including Swing! .
Lynne Taylor-Corbett during a rehearsal for her New York Ballet production of Seven Deadly Sins in New York in 2011. Credit: NYT
Raised in Denver, Lynne Taylor-Corbett moved to New York at 17 to attend the School of American Ballet. Her dreams of establishing a career en pointe did not last long.
“I was never really suited to be a ballet dancer,” she said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. “But I had a gift for theatricality and movement.”
She also had a gift for connecting with audiences, as demonstrated by her work on exuberant Broadway musicals such as Chess (1988) and Titanic (1997), and entertainment-minded ballets such as Seven Deadly Sins (2011) and a New York City Ballet production of a 1933 work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, originally choreographed by George Balanchine, which she directed and choreographed.
Taylor-Corbett later carved out a place in Hollywood – not to mention 1980s lore – by laying down the steps for Kevin Bacon’s famously acrobatic solo dance in Footloose (1984). Her CV also included Hollywood movies like Vanilla Sky (2001) and Bewitched (2005).
“My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood,” she told The New York Times. “Dance should not be a cerebral experience that the dancers have and the audiences watch. I want dancers to communicate something and have the audience receive the same thing.”
In 1999, she choreographed and directed the hit Broadway musical revue Swing! . Simply taking the reins of a major production was an accomplishment for a woman in those days. “Most directors were men,” she said in a video interview last year, “and I had very few female colleagues who succeeded at it, so limited role models.”
A survey of the many forms of swing dancing that flourished during the big band era, Swing! was a celebration of American folk dance. The show contained no dialogue; its narratives were expressed exclusively through music and dance.
The show earned Taylor-Corbett nominations for several accolades, including Tony awards as choreographer and director.
Although she fell short of her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina, Taylor-Corbett did make her mark as a dancer. She toured Africa and the Middle East in the late 1960s with Alvin Ailey’s celebrated dance company.
Christopher Penn gets some pointers from Kevin Bacon in Footloose.Credit: CBS
After leaving the company, she danced on Broadway in shows including Promises, Promises, the 1968 musical by Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach, and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s Seesaw (1973). She was later an understudy for the Cassie role in A Chorus Line.
The cause of her death, at a hospital, was breast cancer, which she had survived for 38 years, her son, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.