\n<\/p>\n
Lynne Taylor-Corbett, a Tony Award-nominated choreographer and director whose colorfully varied career included commissions for New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater as well as Broadway musicals including \u201cSwing!\u201d and films including \u201cFootloose,\u201d died on Jan. 12 in Rockville Centre, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 78.<\/p>\n
The cause of her death, at a hospital, was breast cancer, which she had survived for 38 years, her son, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, said.<\/p>\n
Ms. Taylor-Corbett, who was raised in Denver, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was never really suited<\/a> to be a ballet dancer,\u201d she said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. \u201cBut I had a gift for theatricality and movement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She also had a gift for connecting with audiences, as demonstrated by her work on exuberant Broadway musicals like \u201cChess\u201d<\/a> (1988) and \u201cTitanic\u201d<\/a> (1997), Hollywood movies like \u201cVanilla Sky\u201d<\/a> (2001) and \u201cBewitched\u201d<\/a> (2005), and entertainment-minded ballets like \u201cSeven Deadly Sins\u201d<\/a> (2011), 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood,\u201d she told The Times. \u201cDance 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A pioneering female ballet choreographer in a largely male domain, she prioritized emotion as much as technical precision in such crowd-pleasing works as \u201cChiaroscuro\u201d<\/a> (1994), for City Ballet.<\/p>\n \u201cLynne\u2019s ballets are inhabited by people \u2014 people with emotions of love and loss, joy and sorrow, regret and redemption,\u201d Melissa Podcasy, a principal dancer who often worked with Ms. Taylor-Corbett, said in an email.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her breakout ballet, \u201cGreat Galloping Gottschalk\u201d<\/a> (1982), based on the work of the 19th-century New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, underscored this principle. Her production, for American Ballet Theater in New York, received a decidedly mixed review from Anna Kisselgoff in The New York Times, but Ms. Kisselgoff acknowledged that it was \u201ccheerful and uplifting\u201d and a \u201cwhopping success<\/a> with the public.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe full house, in fact, gave Miss Taylor-Corbett and the ballet the kind of delirious reception reserved for occasional masterpieces, and this \u2018Great Galloping Gottschalk\u2019 certainly is not,\u201d Ms. Kisselgoff wrote. \u201cIt is primarily a surface crowd-pleaser.\u201d<\/p>\n But that was the point. \u201cI want to take dance out to a much larger audience,\u201d Ms. Taylor-Corbett said in 1977. \u201cIt\u2019s not an elite art.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her desire to enchant reached its apotheosis with the hit 1999 Broadway musical revue \u201cSwing!,\u201d<\/a> which she both choreographed and directed. Simply taking the reigns of a major production was an accomplishment for a woman in those days. \u201cMost directors were men<\/a>,\u201d she said in a video interview last year, \u201cand I had very few female colleagues who succeeded at it, so limited role models.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSwing!,\u201d a survey of the many forms of swing dancing that flourished during the big band era, was \u201ca celebration of our American folk dance.\u201d<\/a> she said in a 2013 video interview. The show contained no dialogue; its narratives were expressed exclusively through music and dance \u2014 including a particularly acrobatic bungee number. \u201cIt\u2019s crafted not as a revue in a linear way,\u201d she said, \u201cbut as a giant party.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a less-than-charitable review for The Times, Ben Brantley called \u201cSwing!\u201d \u201ca musical revue that takes its exclamation point seriously<\/a>,\u201d arguing that it \u201cseems to take place in some squeaky-clean, confectionary limbo.\u201d Even so, the show earned Ms. Taylor-Corbett nominations for multiple awards, including Tonys as both choreographer and director.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Lynne Aileen Taylor was born on Dec. 2, 1946, in Denver, the second of six daughters of Travis Henry Taylor, a high school vice principal, and Dorothy (Johnson) Taylor, a music teacher and Juilliard-educated concert pianist who gave Lynne her early introduction to music and dance.<\/p>\n After graduating from Littleton High School in Littleton, Colo., a Denver suburb, in 1964, Lynne headed for New York, where she made ends meet as a hatcheck girl for a Mafia club and an usher at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater) at Lincoln Center, the home of New York City Ballet. Patrolling the aisles gave her an opportunity to study the work of master choreographers like Jerome Robbins<\/a> and George Balanchine<\/a>.<\/p>\n Although she fell short of her dreams of becoming a prima ballerina, Ms. Taylor-Corbett did make her mark as a dancer. She toured Africa and the Middle East in the late 1960s as the only white member in Alvin Ailey<\/a>\u2019s celebrated dance company.<\/p>\n After leaving the company, she danced on Broadway in shows including \u201cPromises, Promises,\u201d<\/a> the 1968 musical by Neil Simon and Burt Bacharach, and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh\u2019s \u201cSeesaw\u201d<\/a> (1973). She was later an understudy for the Cassie role in \u201cA Chorus Line.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Slowly, however, she began to see her future in choreography, although she also continued to dance for several years. \u201cFive years ago my career meant my legs and arms and body,\u201d she told The Times in 1977, \u201cand today my intellect and mind count, too.\u201d<\/p>\n Her career took a turn in 1972 when she helped found the Theater Dance Collection, a company that used narrative, poetry and songs with the goal of \u201cchanging the image of dance, to making it entertaining as well as art,\u201d The Times said. With little interest in the intellectual frontiers of dance, its founders jokingly referred to themselves as the \u201cderri\u00e8re\u2010garde.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She later carved out a place in Hollywood \u2014 not to mention 1980s lore \u2014 by laying down the steps for Kevin Bacon\u2019s famously acrobatic solo dance in \u201cFootloose\u201d<\/a> (1984), Herbert Ross\u2019s feel-good film about a Midwestern teenager hoofing his way past small-town repression.<\/p>\n In addition to her son, Ms. Taylor-Corbett is survived by five sisters, Sharon Taylor Talbot, Kelly Taylor, Janny Murphy, Leslie Taylor and Kathleen Taylor. Her marriage to Michael Corbett, a music executive, ended in divorce in 1983.<\/p>\n Ms. Taylor-Corbett worked with ballet companies around the world, including more than 25 years at Carolina Ballet in Raleigh, N.C. In 2009, she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award<\/a> for choreography for \u201cMy Vaudeville Man!,\u201d<\/a> <\/em>which she also directed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n