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.”
