Patrick Corbin: life after ballet; the former hippie at the School of American Ballet finds the grass is greener at Paul Taylor Dance Company - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, June, 1994 by Janice Berman

The former hippie at the School of American ballet finds the grass is greener at Paul Taylor Dance Company.

All eyes are on Patrick Corbin, whose solo leads off Paul Taylor's A Field of Grass, a pungent evocation of the hippie sixties. As the curtain rises Corbin's character is sitting cross-legged, not only in grass but most likely on it.

To the strains of "Mother Nature's Son," one of a string of Harry Nilsson songs, Corbin, clad in the era's obligatory denim, rises, turns, and accelerates in widening circles. His arms are wide, his palms are up, his head is back. His ecstasy is contagious, creating widening circles of Corbin fans.

He's more winsome than handsome, and less muscled than some of the other Taylor men (though he said he began pumping iron the minute the Paul Taylor Dance Company audition notice went up). Yet he brings to the dance brash confidence, palpable intensity, and a seamless fusion of his own classical background--four years with the Joffrey Ballet--with Taylor's distinctive modernism.

Corbin, twenty-nine, first leaped into the spotlight, and into the public eye, when he created the role of the caddish young man of Company B, Taylor's 1991 evocation of World War II set to recordings by the Andrews Sisters. As Johnny, the heartbreaker in "Oh, Johnny, Oh," Corbin jumps and spins at crazy angles in a reckless endurance contest that would kill anyone not suited to the moves or whom the moves didn't suit. But thanks to Taylor, Corbin, unlike the lost flower child of A Field of Grass, has found what he was looking for. All it took him was a quarter of a century, a heap of talent, and a lot of persistence.

His odyssey began at the age of three. His mother, a former ballet student, saw that little Patrick had a lot of energy. "She wanted to channel it, and that was that," the blond, nicely biceped Corbin said one night over a Thai dinner on Manhattan's West Side. "Before I knew it, I was doing it every day."

In conversation, Corbin seems like anything but a self-described "gloomy gus," but he says that when he was a kid he didn't feel like smiling when he was dancing. Even then he thought of it as serious work.

He graduated from the "Dolly Dingle thing," a neighborhood studio in Potomac, Maryland, where he learned tap, jazz, ballet, and acrobatics, to studies with Bernard Spriggs at the District of Columbia City Ballet, and then to the Washington School of Ballet. As a teenager he recalled how his mother, Rosemary, "the car goddess," ferried him there from his Potomac high school. "She'd have a steak and a baked potato in the car for me, on a tray, and I'd eat it as she drove me in the Pinto, with the sunroof pushed back."

His teacher, and a lifetime inspiration, was Alastair Munro. "He was bigger than life. He looked like Rock Hudson, very masculine. He was very caring and supportive of all of us. He taught us to love ballet, which is hard when you're twelve or thirteen," Corbin said, chuckling, "and have to look in the mirror every day."

Mary Day, still the school's director, was another strong influence; when Corbin cut class to go to rock concerts, she never took away his scholarship. And so was the Washington Ballet's late choreographer Choo San Goh. "He could be really hard, but he had such clear ideas about what he wanted from you."

And Corbin always had clear ideas about what he wanted, too. He never doubted for a minute that he would be a dancer, from the days when he solemnly tap danced for his elementary school classmates at show and tell--"Gene Kelly was my idol"--to his dance recitals, to his appearances with Washington Ballet. George, his father, who is an electrical engineer, and Rosemary, who owned a couple of ice cream stores, were always "totally supportive," he says. And Mary, his older sister, helped pay for his summer workshops.

What Corbin wanted was to join New York City Ballet let and live and work in New York, and he set out on this chosen career path with studies at the School of American Ballet. His first summer, at seventeen, he took an SAB workshop and also took classes at American Ballet Theatre II, the short-lived school started by ABT.

That first summer was "wonderful," but by the second, adolescent rebellion had kicked in. Perhaps prophetically, Corbin became a hippie. "I had long hair, past my shoulders." He was not asked to continue his studies at SAB. "Madame [Nathalie] Gleboff told me I lacked ,the gift of movement.", Corbin's father's reaction? "Well, for the record, say he said she was full of beans." But he also suggested that Corbin get a haircut. He complied.

After another year in Washington, Corbin took company class with City Ballet through the good offices of alumna Bonita Borne and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, with whom Corbin had studied at the Chatauqua Institute. Things did not work out the way Corbin hoped. "Peter [Martins] showed up the third day. It was sort of a runaround. I was pretty clueless at this point. He said, 'You need fine tuning. Why don't you go to the school?" Corbin thought that meant that he was accepted, but no; it meant that he had to audition. He got in, and spent "a miserable year."