Taylor-made sensation.

Paul Taylor company star dance Patrick Corbin has lived a complicated and very out life, onstage and off

Few dancers Seem so naturally born to embody a single choreographer's style of dancing as does Patrick Corbin of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. "I totally fell in love with his work from the first hint of it," says Corbin. "I think that I was meant to do what I'm doing from the very beginning." That fact is all the more remarkable because Corbin had received almost no modern dance training when he defected from the Joffrey Ballet to Taylor's company. "When I saw the Taylor audition notice go up, I hiked my ass up to the Martha Graham school and started taking Level I Graham technique," he recalls.

Corbin is indeed a rarity--one of the few ballet dancers who in a wholesale change translated a career in ballet into that of one of America's finest modern dancers. Now the senior member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Corbin was featured in many of Taylor's works during the 2001 New York City Center season.

As a youngster growing up in Maryland, Corbin says, "I was totally obsessed with Shirley Temple." That obsession was later transferred to the Technicolor showmanship of Gene Kelly. "I always have an image of him in my head when I'm dancing," Corbin says. "He was so masculine yet so sensitive and light." After training at the Washington School of Ballet and the School of American Ballet in New York, Corbin joined the Joffrey Ballet, where on his first day in rehearsal he fatefully began learning Taylor's ballet Arden Court.

Corbin's ascending career with the Joffrey coincided with his coming-out as a gay man at age 21. While working on a ballet created by choreographer Mark Morris in 1986, Corbin was cast as a principal dancer opposite one of Joffrey's lead dancers, Philip Jerry. "I was totally in love with him, and it was a painful process making this dance," says Corbin. Moms recognized the situation and took Corbin aside. "Mark just said, `Go for it. Don't try to save face, be true to yourself. Tell him that you love him. Go--just go.'" Corbin did, and he and Jerry became lovers and life partners.

Corbin says that before Robert Joffrey fell ill with AIDS, Joffrey met with the company every week, advising them to widen their artistic knowledge. "He told us what to see off-Broadway, he told us about Madonna before she became famous, about Danceteria and Junior Vasquez," he recalls. When Joffrey was hospitalized, however, the company management withheld any information about the director's condition. "It was a good lesson on how not to handle that situation," says Corbin. "Information is a good thing."

It was shortly after Joffrey's death in 1988 that Corbin heard about the Paul Taylor audition. In addition to his crash course in Graham technique, he sprinted to the gym to gain a more buffed Taylor look ("I was all of 136 pounds"). Out of more than 200 dancers who auditioned, Corbin was hired. With Taylor's guidance, he absorbed the master's choreographic tenor and has become one of the standard-bearers of the company, a dancer whom Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times calls "typically fast on his feet and brilliant." Corbin has originated roles in Taylor signature pieces like A Field of Grass, Company B, and Piazzola Caldera and was highlighted in the 1998 Academy Award-nominated documentary Dancemaker, which focused on Taylor's distinguished career.

Corbin points to the creation of Taylor's Eventide in 1996 as his most poignant working experience in the company, due to the personal tragedy unfolding outside of the rehearsal studio. "It is a very personal piece," Corbin explains. "My lover [Jerry] was dying as we were making it. It's about death and relationship. Paul tuned right in to that."

After Jerry died of AIDS complications, Corbin for a time lost himself in what he calls a "wild period" in New York's gay Chelsea neighborhood. He almost quit dancing, but Taylor helped him "to reel it in," Corbin says. "He didn't judge. He just said, `OK, let go of the guilt, get over it, you're doing OK, you haven't lost it. Get back to earth.' And then he said, `But not completely--you've got to have fun.'"

Having just turned 36, Corbin has recently begun a new relationship and has bought a house in Harlem. Whatever the current political climate, he feels optimistic about the progression of gay rights in America. "I grew up in D.C. during the Reagan era. I don't think there could have been a more horrible time in American politics," says Corbin, who as a teenager protested at both of Reagan's inaugurations. "Nobody now bothers me as much as anybody from that era."

Carman also writes for The New York Times.

For The Advocate's coverage of Dancemaker and links to related Web site, go to www.advocate.com