"This little ballet says it all"

Last performed by the company in 2017, Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Chiaroscuro returns to the NYCB stage this spring. The timing is notable, as it marks a cherished if challenging lead role for Principal Dancer Andrew Veyette in his farewell performance, and as Taylor-Corbett passed away just this past January. “Chiaroscuro is definitely one of her masterpieces and it's an honor and privilege that New York City Ballet is doing it,” says her son, actor, singer, and writer Shaun Taylor-Corbett. “It's just such a gift to have this happening now.” As the dancers—some stepping into familiar roles, others learning them for the first time—prepare for the ballet’s upcoming performances, we spoke with several of the artists involved in creating this unique, audience-favorite work.

“Lynne and I go way back, to the early ‘80s, maybe ‘82, when she was doing a piece at American Ballet Theater called Great Galloping Gottschalk, and I was the assistant to the director of a company called Barbara Matera, Ltd. and we were given the task of creating the costumes. Lynne and I just really hit it off,” shares costume designer Holly Hynes. “I had come from a theater background, both in film and mainly onstage, and that was Lynne's area of expertise—besides dance. I wasn't floundering, but I was brand new to this world, and it was great to have somebody who spoke the same language.” (Shaun Taylor-Corbett recalled that it was this ballet—Great Galloping Gottschalk, whose “delirius reception” from the full house was remarked by Anna Kisselgoff in a New York Times review of the premiere, that inspired director Herbert Ross to ask Taylor-Corbett to choreograph Kevin Bacon’s solo in the 1988 film Footloose.)

Hynes and Taylor-Corbett collaborated again in 1985 on a piece for the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company; by their third project together, Hynes had already become NYCB’s director of costumes, her position with the company for 21 years. “Peter [Martins] had held this carrot up of the Diamond Project—that I could be the in-house designer for the costumes,” she said. Named for its main donor, Irene Diamond, and launched to foster new works from rising choreographers, the first Diamond Project performances took place in 1992. One of the inaugural installment's pieces was Taylor-Corbett’s Mercury. “She wanted to use me, which was very sweet,” says Hynes. “And those costumes were packed with color. I think there's every color in the rainbow in that ballet.” Taylor-Corbett's next commissioned work for the company was Chiaroscuro, for the second iteration of the Diamond Project in 1994; for this ballet, the color palette was decidedly different. “It's hard to do a ballet that is given a painterly term as the title,” Hynes says. An Italian term, “chiaroscuro” translates to “light-dark” and generally refers to marked contrasts in light and shade in works of visual art. “I thought of using a grayscale, where you start from the palest gray, and you work your way up to almost black.”

“When you're in the height of it and you're dancing in New York City Ballet, you’re just constantly in motion,” remembers Stacey Calvert, who was a soloist in 1994 and one of Chiaroscuro’s original cast members. “You were always learning something new. Jerry Robbins was creating a new work. Peter was creating a new work. A new choreographer would come in. And then the Diamond Project would happen, which was around 12 commissioned new works that would happen in a period of, I think, two weeks.” Despite the remarkable volume of ballets she learned, rehearsed, and performed at the time, Chiaroscuro stands out in Calvert’s memory. “It was intense. But I loved that process,” she says. “My role was the love interest, which was not something I was used to doing in ballets. I was usually the firecracker, the one that was wearing red and black, jumping and turning. This was a nice departure. I got to be soft and pretty and lifted; I was 'love.' It was so beautiful for me to get to do that, and to be given that opportunity—that she saw me in that light.”

For James Fayette, just being one of the ballet’s original dancers was a departure. “I had been in the company just three years, so I was a nobody, back-line corps, in a mouse costume, whatever it was. The people in that ballet—Jock Soto was a superstar, Tom Gold, Zippora Karz, Stacey Calvert, Sherri LeBlanc—were established, important dancers. I used to break dance a little bit when I was coming up in the ‘80s, so I would do some weird, funny stuff, just messing around. I think Lynne Taylor-Corbett might have seen that I had a little bit of an addition to my dance vocabulary, and I think that intrigued her. Maybe that’s why, because it was a total fluke that I got into this all-star cast.” Of course, being cast was only the beginning; when Chiaroscuro premiered, it was a hit with the audience, and Fayette experienced that success as well. “The audience was really raving after every performance,” he says. “It was a really special standout for the season."

“Jerome Robbins, who was very active at that time, had come to a performance, because he had to fix or do something during the intermission really quickly,” Fayette recalls. “He came onstage and was getting one of his ballets tightened up right before the curtain rose. I was walking across the stage in my sweatpants, having just performed Chiaroscuro, and he says—and this is not typical for Jerry—‘Hey you.’ He didn't even know my name. He said, ‘Nice job.’ Ever since that moment, I started getting little featured roles in Jerry’s ballets. After that, I'd get slightly better roles. Then, all of a sudden, I might get a featured role in a Balanchine ballet. That was really the beginning of my career at NYCB. I feel like I can pinpoint that moment, when Jerry picked me out in the intermission after a performance of Chiaroscuro, that everything turned around for me, and it was because Lynne Taylor-Corbett had first seen something in me and was able to bring it out in her choreography. I'm just so happy that that happened.”

“In New York City Ballet, there are no small parts, as we like to say. But that was the first time I felt like, ‘I'm really expressing myself.’”

“It's this beautiful chamber work,” says Repertory Director Christine Redpath, who worked with Lynne Taylor-Corbett on each of the ballets she created for the company, from Mercury through The Seven Deadly Sins in 2011. “The performances of Chiaroscuro this spring are a lovely tribute to her. She emailed me after she'd let me know that she wouldn’t be able to come to see class or rehearsals [this year] to say, ‘This little ballet says it all.’”

In a recent documentary, Taylor-Corbett discussed “The Why of the Work”: “I think there’s always a ‘why’ in what we do, artistically. I think sometimes you don’t know what it is, you think you’re just creating an abstraction, and then you realize, years later, that you were coping with something that was very deep. In the case of Chiaroscuro, I realized, maybe five years after I had done it, upon seeing it again, that I was actually examining the fact that I’d never grieved for my father’s death. I had never talked about it with anyone, I didn’t go home to his funeral—there were too many of us, six girls, four of us in New York, and we didn't have the money to go home. I kept seeing a solo man and someone going through life; initially, I tried to shoehorn it into the life of Christ, and that didn’t work. When I saw what the audience felt at the end, I knew that I had tapped into something in myself that would only be tapped into through a medium and not through my own one-on-one experience with anybody.”

“It's not a story ballet, per se, but it is definitely something spiritual,” says Redpath. “I think it's about the human condition, whether or not the dancers are different aspects of this solo man’s persona, or whether they're people in his life. And that life is darkness and light. We all have that rage. We all have that serenity. She was referring to the contrast of the dark and the light, and that it's all of a piece.” Calvert’s thinking about the ballet runs along similar lines: “As humans, we have to have a dark side to be able to have a light side,” she says. “I think the dark is always drawn to the light, and the light can prevail in the end. In this ballet’s ending, when the lead dancer is open and reaching with his chest and his arms are spread wide, and he's alone on the stage, I think that he's gone. [But] there was no telling of the story. It's an abstract work, so it's open to interpretation.”

“I always felt it was Jock Soto's ballet, and we were elements of and themes within his life,” Fayette says. “I don't think each dancer represented an individual person or character; maybe I was some sort of force or impact, not necessarily a person, but something that was somehow moving his story forward. She was in touch with Jock, and pulled out some very individual elements of his life experience. Even having been in the piece, I don't know exactly what those elements are. That was between just the two of them. She wanted to pull out what was individualistic about each person and really showcase that. I tended to be a stronger partner, so as you'll see, I think I partnered everybody. I threw Tom, I partnered with Jock Soto, and I caught the women; that was something that I felt very confident with, and I got to do a lot of exciting partnering. So it was very personal.”

Whether emotions, inner turmoil, interactions, or external forces, the ballet features five dancers interacting with the lead in time with the score, Francesco Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso, Op. 5 No. 12 in D minor, called "La Follia"—which translates to “the madness.” Like the artworks pointed to by the ballet's title and Hynes’s grayscale costumes, the music weaves a texturally complex web of bursts of lightness and swooning passages with a rich, dark weight. “I'm so lucky, working with Jerry’s and Mr. B’s and Lynne’s ballets, that these choreographers are very deeply involved with the music,” shares Redpath. “What they create is this strong, if not amazing, physical representation of the sound. The dancers then need to find those textures in their movement so that it's authentic and real; then the audience gets it. She wanted the authentic dancer to shine within the structure she provided.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Taylor-Corbett reflected on the intention behind her creative approach: “My goal as a dancer and choreographer is to be understood. 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.” This couldn’t be more evident than in Chiaroscuro, a ballet whose imagery, though rooted in emotions and personal imagery, has inspired rapturous responses from audiences each time it takes the stage. “Chiaroscuro was really something special, because, first and foremost, Lynne was a storyteller,” says Hynes. “But not only did she tell a story, she told it through movement and emotion and expression without words. Not very many people do that as smoothly and succinctly as she did—and, she was just a joy to be around.”

“Lynne was an amazing person, just amazing to work with, so kind, warm, gentle, so giving and thoughtful,” seconds Calvert. “She could tell a story in just such a beautiful way. She had a quiet but strong presence, and a strong point of view; she definitely had a vision of what she wanted and how she wanted it to look.” Adds Fayette: “It was her thing, but she let us have a voice, or at least allowed us to add some personal texture to everything."

“Working with Lynne was such a respectful experience,” he continues. “As you come into New York City Ballet, you're trying to find your place and your voice. She was the first person in an authority position to look me in the eye and say, ‘You have value and you have an artistic voice. I'm not just using you because you have a nice line or a nice pose, or you can do a nice jump; I see you for who you are.’ At the same time, I started to get involved in the dancers’ union. After I stopped dancing with NYCB, I was the union executive, and I went around the country negotiating employment contracts, including New York City Ballet's employment contract. So that's what I did after my career transition, and I think Lynne was one of the early sparks for my thinking, ‘These individual dancers have value as individual people and demand a certain level of respect, above and beyond respect for their abilities to do fantastic things with their bodies.’ It really distilled my union work down to what it was. It was respect. This was the ballet that restarted or reset who I was as an artist and as a person in the dance world.”

The return of this ballet offers Hynes an opportunity to reflect similarly on the impact this period had on her career. “Once you connect with this company, whether you're there for six years or 60 years, it's part of your history,” she says. “I feel like I have a big history with Lynne Taylor-Corbett. I realize now that really it was only four ballets that we were involved with together; in the scheme of things, that's not that many, but it shows you what a dynamite personality she was, and how much she cared and how much she shared. What a legacy she left behind, between Broadway and movies and ballet.”

“It's funny that you can be so far away from your career—I retired in 2000, 25 years ago—but I still feel like that girl. I get in the studio, and that's still such a huge part of me,” agrees Calvert. “It was a very prolific time, with lots of new things coming out in the dance world—dance was evolving in a significant way. It was such a great opportunity to be able to work with all these choreographers, and I feel so lucky to have been one of those six dancers that were able to work with Lynne and be in that room with her.”

“She was so caring to all of the artists and treated everyone with respect, kindness, and openness, so that everyone felt taken care of,” says Shaun Taylor-Corbett. “She would be very gentle—she never lost her cool. She was all about the artist. That was her spirituality. I got to work with her on Distant Thunder for over 13 years—she directed me in the show, and we co-wrote it together—and I saw it firsthand. Performing itself was magical, but getting to work with my mom, day in, day out, and observe her directing, that collaboration was a dream. It was a gift. And everyone that came into her sphere always talks about that, their gratitude for the time they had working with her.” Just before we spoke, Lynne Taylor-Corbett posthumously received the Lucille Lortel award for Outstanding Choreographer for her work on Distant Thunder.

For all these reasons, the company is thrilled to perform Chiaroscuro again, now, and for new audiences, many of whom may not be familiar with (or know that they’ve been familiar with, in the case of Footloose fans, for example) Taylor-Corbett’s work. “It’s a joyful experience for all of us, to offer this as a gift to her and her legacy, and recognize what she generously gave of herself in so many ways,” says Redpath. “To be the ones to keep that light shining is such an honor.”

_{The Seven Deadly Sins rehearsal photo (2011) of Lynne Taylor-Corbett and former NYCB Company Member Giovanni Villalobos © Paul Kolnik. Chiaroscuro rehearsal photos (2025) by Ella Spruill © New York City Ballet.}