Lynne Taylor-Corbett, ‘Footloose’ Choreographer, Dies at 78

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 “Swing!” and films including “Footloose,” died on Jan. 12 in Rockville Centre, N.Y., on Long Island. She was 78.

The cause of her death, at a hospital, was breast cancer, which she had survived for 38 years, her son, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, said.

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.

“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 like “Chess” (1988) and “Titanic” (1997), Hollywood movies like “Vanilla Sky” (2001) and “Bewitched” (2005), and entertainment-minded ballets like “Seven Deadly Sins” (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.

“My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood,” she told The 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.”

A pioneering female ballet choreographer in a largely male domain, she prioritized emotion as much as technical precision in such crowd-pleasing works as “Chiaroscuro” (1994), for City Ballet.

“Lynne’s ballets are inhabited by people — people with emotions of love and loss, joy and sorrow, regret and redemption,” Melissa Podcasy, a principal dancer who often worked with Ms. Taylor-Corbett, said in an email.

Her breakout ballet, “Great Galloping Gottschalk” (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 “cheerful and uplifting” and a “whopping success with the public.”

“The full house, in fact, gave Miss Taylor-Corbett and the ballet the kind of delirious reception reserved for occasional masterpieces, and this ‘Great Galloping Gottschalk’ certainly is not,” Ms. Kisselgoff wrote. “It is primarily a surface crowd-pleaser.”

But that was the point. “I want to take dance out to a much larger audience,” Ms. Taylor-Corbett said in 1977. “It’s not an elite art.”

Her desire to enchant reached its apotheosis with the hit 1999 Broadway musical revue “Swing!,” which she both choreographed and directed. Simply taking the reigns 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.”

“Swing!,” a survey of the many forms of swing dancing that flourished during the big band era, was “a celebration of our American folk dance.” she said in a 2013 video interview. The show contained no dialogue; its narratives were expressed exclusively through music and dance — including a particularly acrobatic bungee number. “It’s crafted not as a revue in a linear way,” she said, “but as a giant party.”

In a less-than-charitable review for The Times, Ben Brantley called “Swing!” “a musical revue that takes its exclamation point seriously,” arguing that it “seems to take place in some squeaky-clean, confectionary limbo.” Even so, the show earned Ms. Taylor-Corbett nominations for multiple awards, including Tonys as both choreographer and director.

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.

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 and George Balanchine.

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’s celebrated dance company.

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.”

Slowly, however, she began to see her future in choreography, although she also continued to dance for several years. “Five years ago my career meant my legs and arms and body,” she told The Times in 1977, “and today my intellect and mind count, too.”

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 “changing the image of dance, to making it entertaining as well as art,” The Times said. With little interest in the intellectual frontiers of dance, its founders jokingly referred to themselves as the “derrière‐garde.”

She 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), Herbert Ross’s feel-good film about a Midwestern teenager hoofing his way past small-town repression.

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.

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 for choreography for “My Vaudeville Man!,” which she also directed.

In recent years Ms. Taylor-Corbett had become consumed with “Distant Thunder,” a Native American-themed musical that she created with her son, a Broadway performer himself, who starred in an Off Broadway production that had a limited run last fall.

“Distant Thunder,” featuring actors of Native descent, focused on a member of the Blackfeet Nation who was removed from tribal lands as a boy, only to return years later as a successful lawyer with ambitious plans. The subject matter lay beyond her immediate life experience, but Shaun Taylor-Corbett said, his mother always sought to push past her comfort zone to tell new stories.

“Every life requires a certain amount of invention,” Ms. Taylor-Corbett said in the 2024 video interview, “but the life of a freelance artist requires constant invention. I mean, how do any of us become who we are? I believe it’s important to tell our stories, and leave behind what wisdom we can.”