Lynn Taylor-Corbett is a Tony Award-nominated choreographer and director whose diverse career includes commissions for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, as well as productions such as Swing! Includes appearances in Broadway musicals. He died on January 12th in Rockville Center, Long Island, New York. She was 78 years old.
The cause of death at the hospital was breast cancer, which she survived for 38 years, her son Sean Taylor-Corbett said.
Taylor Corbett grew up in Denver and moved to New York at age 17 to attend the School of American Ballet. Her dream of establishing a career en pointe did not last long.
“I was never cut out to be a ballet dancer,” she said in a 1977 New York Times interview. “But I had a flair for theatricality and movement.”
He has also appeared in cult Broadway musicals such as “Chess” (1988) and “Titanic” (1997), and Hollywood films such as “Vanilla Sky” (2001) and “Enchanted” (2005). As evidenced by her performances, she also had a talent for connecting with audiences. ), and entertainment-oriented ballets such as The Seven Deadly Sins (2011), a New York City Ballet production of the 1933 work. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, originally choreographed by George Balanchine, directed and choreographed by her.
“My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood,” she told the Times. “Dance should not be an intellectual experience that the dancers experience and the audience watches. We want the dancers to have something to say and the audience to receive the same thing.”
A pioneering female ballet choreographer in a male-dominated field, she prioritized emotion over technical precision in crowd-pleasing pieces like City Ballet's Chiaroscuro (1994). did.
“In Lynn's ballets, people live with emotions such as love and loss, joy and sadness, regret and redemption,” said principal dancer Melissa Podkasie, who often worked with Ms. Taylor-Corbett. said in an email.
Her blockbuster ballet The Great Galloping Gottschalk (1982), based on the work of 19th-century New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, emphasized this principle. Her work for New York's American Ballet Theater received a decidedly mixed review from Anna Kisselgov in the New York Times, although Kisselgov found it “hilarious and uplifting” and “popular.” It was a great success among the people.”
“Indeed, the sold-out audience gave Miss Taylor-Corbett and the ballet the enthusiastic reception characteristic of occasional masterpieces, but this 'Gottschalk' is certainly not one of them,” Ms. Kisselgov wrote. Ta. “It's mostly a superficial crowd-pleaser.”
But that was the point. Taylor Corbett said in 1977, “I want to bring dance to a wider audience. Dance is not an elite art.”
Her desire for glamor culminated in the 1999 hit Broadway musical revue “Swing!,” which she choreographed and directed. For a woman at the time, directing a major production was a feat in itself. “Most of the directors were men,” she said in a video interview last year. “And there were very few female colleagues who did it successfully, so role models were limited.”
“Swing!,'' which explored the various forms of swing dance that flourished during the big band era, was “a celebration of American folk dance.'' she said in a 2013 video interview. The show contained no dialogue. The story was told solely through music and dance, including an especially acrobatic bungee number. “It’s not built as a linear revue, but as a giant party,” she said.
Ben Brantley called it “Swing!” in a not-so-charitable review for the Times. It claimed to be “a music review that takes its exclamation points seriously” and “seems to take place in some pretty, candy-like limbo”. Still, the show earned Ms. Taylor Corbett multiple award nominations, including a Tony, as both choreographer and director.
Lynn Eileen Taylor was born in Denver on December 2, 1946, the sixth daughter of high school assistant principal Travis Henry Taylor and Dorothy (Johnson) Taylor, a music teacher and Juilliard-educated concert pianist. Born as the second child of Her early encounters with music and dance.
After graduating from Littleton High School in Littleton, Colorado, outside of Denver, in 1964, Lynn headed to New York, where she earned a living as a Hatcheck Girl at the Mafia Club and an usher at the New York State Theater (now The Theater). The David H. Koch Theater) is located at Lincoln Center, home of the New York City Ballet. Patrolling the aisles gave her the opportunity to study the work of master choreographers like Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine.
Although Taylor-Corbett never achieved her dream of becoming a prima ballerina, she made a name for herself as a dancer. She toured Africa and the Middle East in the late 1960s as the only white member of Alvin Ailey's famous dance company.
After leaving the company, she danced on Broadway in the 1968 musical Promise Promise by Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach, and Seesaw (1973) with Cy Coleman and Carolyn Lee. She later filled in for the role of Cassie in “A Chorus Line.”
But slowly, she began to see her future in choreography, although she also continued dancing for several years. “Five years ago, my career meant legs, arms, and body,” she told The Times in 1977. “And now my intellect and spirit matter too.”
Her career took a turn in 1972, when she helped found the Theater and Dance Collection. The company used stories, poetry, and songs with the goal of “changing the image of dance and making it as much entertainment as it is art,” the Times reported. Although they had little interest in the intellectual frontiers of dance, the founders jokingly referred to themselves as the “Derrière Garde.”
She later performed Kevin Bacon's famous acrobatic solo dance steps in Footloose (1984), a feel-good film about Midwestern teenagers hoofing their way through elementary and middle schools, directed by Herbert Ross. and established himself in Hollywood, not to mention a legend in the 1980s. -City repression.
In addition to her son, Ms. Taylor Corbett is survived by five sisters: Sharon Taylor Talbot, Kelly Taylor, Janie Murphy, Leslie Taylor, and Kathleen Taylor. Her marriage to music executive Michael Corbett ended in divorce in 1983.
Ms. Taylor Corbett has worked with ballet companies around the world, including more than 25 years with Carolina Ballet in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 2009, he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his choreography for My Vaudeville Man!, which he also directed. .
In recent years, Ms. Taylor-Corbett has become obsessed with the Native American-themed musical “Distant Thunder,'' which she co-created with her son, a Broadway actor. He appeared in the production.
Starring Indigenous actors, “Distant Thunder'' focuses on a member of the Blackfeet tribe who is exiled from his tribe's land as a boy and returns years later as a successful lawyer with ambitious plans. I guessed it. Although the subject matter was beyond her direct life experience, Sean Taylor-Corbett said her mother was always looking to tell new stories beyond her comfort zone.
“Every life requires some degree of invention,” Ms. Taylor-Corbett said in a 2024 video interview. “But the life of a freelance artist requires constant invention. That is, how do we become who we are? Telling our stories and leaving behind as much wisdom as we can?” I believe it is important to go.”
