Remembering Dancer, Choreographer, and Director Lynne Taylor-Corbett, 1946–2025

January 22, 2025

Renowned multi-hyphenate dance and theater artist Lynne Taylor-Corbett died on January 12, 2025, at age 78. For decades, her presence in the dance, musical theater, and entertainment industries was substantial and constantly evolving. She tailored her movement style to ballet companies, modern dance groups, Broadway shows, hit movies, and commercials. The through line in her varied work is an undercurrent of joy and humanity—of not taking anything too seriously.

Taylor-Corbett was born and raised in Denver, one of six sisters. She was first introduced to dance through her mother, who played piano for local ballet classes. At 17, Taylor-Corbett moved to New York City to attend the School of American Ballet. (While studying, she worked as an usher at what was then called the New York State Theater, the Lincoln Center home of New York City Ballet.) In 1967, she joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, with which she performed for two seasons. Over the years she also danced in several Broadway shows, including Promises, Promises and A Chorus Line, where she was an understudy for Cassie.

Eventually she began experimenting with choreography. She quickly learned that while technical excellence was important, the feeling of the movement mattered most to her. “I realized I was to work from my sensations in my dance, rather than from mirror images,” she said in an interview with Dance Magazine in 1976. “I’m not frightened of my image as a dancer. It’s just something I find joy in, not something I hang my ego on.” Her search for an organic quality within movement led her to create works that emphasized storytelling, humor, and absurdity, while also holding tightly to musicality and technique.

In 1972 she became one of five founding members of Theatre Dance Collection, an ensemble that created highly theatrical pieces blending all of those elements. As her reputation grew, she began to receive a steady flow of commission requests and job offers from various corners of the entertainment world. Perhaps the highest-profile was 1984’s Footloose—her thrashy, angsty movement for star Kevin Bacon became instantly iconic. In ballet, she developed a close relationship with Carolina Ballet, and created or set pieces for American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Miami City Ballet. She choreographed seven Broadway shows, including Chess, Titanic, and 1999’s Swing!, for which she received Tony nominations for her choreography and direction. She taught classes all over the country, continued to work frequently in film and television, and lent her moves to commercials and industrials for a variety of brands.

She enjoyed working with actors who didn’t have any dance training, and using movement to unlock a more kinetic energy in a performance. “My own personal high is working with wildly diverse performers who fill me with inspiration,” she wrote in a 1991essay for this magazine. In a subsequent profile, in 1997, she said, “I like to report on what I’m seeing. If I have a contribution to make, it’s a view of what’s going on around me. It’s also a more deeply felt impression of what is in me.”

In the final years of her life, Taylor-Corbett and her son Shaun co-wrote a musical, Distant Thunder, telling the story of a man who was taken from his native Blackfeet tribe as a child. It premiered at A.R.T./New York Theatres last fall with direction and choreography by Taylor-Corbett.

In a series of social media posts about their last days together, Shaun recounted dancing in the hospital room with his mother. “She danced with the same joy and abandon she always had since she was a young girl,” he wrote. “She maintained a childlike innocence and joy for the world that never diminished.”