The Best Move of His Career

You can’t miss Patrick Corbin among the men of the Paul Taylor Dance Company. He is the only blond. And even in a company famous for its superbly tuned dancers, his every gesture speaks of an artist in his element.

When the New York-based Taylor company performs this weekend at Glendale’s Alex Theatre (in the finale of a residency that has included appearances by the Taylor 2 company, master classes and other education efforts), Corbin will dance the male lead in the opening duet in Taylor’s 1985 “Roses.” He will also be featured in the confrontational and steamy tango-based local premiere, “Piazzola Caldera” (1997). And, though he doesn’t dance in it, his imprint is on the other local premiere on the program, this year’s “Oh You Kid,” an affectionate though darkly tinged evocation of the popular dances of the ragtime era.

Corbin celebrates his 10th anniversary with the troupe this year, and he still considers himself the luckiest guy in the world: He gets to dance with one of the great modern dance companies of our time.

“It’s maybe the best dance job you could possibly have,” he says. “It feeds every part of your artistic, athletic and spiritual being. They treat us with a lot of respect; we are working with a creative genius, plus we get to travel the world and get paid for it.” Even on days when he is exhausted and the muscles ache, putting on dance clothes one more time is more than worth the effort. “You come into the studio, and they put on the music for ‘Airs’ or ‘Esplanade,’ and there is at least a moment when [the pain] is suspended. So even on bad days with this company there is a certain sense of accomplishment because it is a challenge all the time.” Getting to this point was no easy task. Not only did Corbin have to triumph over 250 other candidates during a tough two-day audition process, he walked in the door with very little experience in modern dance.

The opportunity could not have come at a better time for the now-34-year-old native of Potomac, Md. He had been an avid ballet student as a child and was a member of the Joffrey Ballet for four years when in the late ‘80s his world started falling apart.

“After Mr. Joffrey died [the company] was a horrible place to work. Without his vision, it turned into a dark place very quickly,” Corbin remembered, a few days before the Taylor company’s opening night in San Francisco, among its other West Coast stops this spring. He began looking around for alternatives. He took acting and voice lessons with the idea of moving to Broadway. And he showed up at the Taylor audition.

The choreographer’s work wasn’t totally foreign to Corbin. The Joffrey had some Taylor dances in its repertory, but Corbin had no illusions about his chances. Every year hundreds of well-trained, gifted dancers vie for jobs in companies like Taylor’s and Corbin didn’t think he would make it, particularly since many of his competitors had studied at the Taylor school and were more familiar with the Taylor style than he was.

“But lo and behold, it happened, I got in and Paul asked me whether I could join the company right away. I told him I was still under contract with Joffrey for another two months but was sure that I could get released. But Paul suggested that I finish my time with Joffrey.”

As it turned out, Corbin and the Joffrey had a parting of the ways before his contract was up, and in the interim, he threw himself into preparing for his new job with Taylor.

“As soon as I knew I was coming into this company, I started going to the gym,” he says. At the time he was between 15 and 20 pounds lighter than he is now and he needed to build bulk. “I am very slight, and I knew I wanted to build strength but also to build a certain aesthetic, because those guys in the Taylor company were huge muscular men.” He also took classes at the Taylor school to acquire a basic sense of the repertoire and, maybe most important, enrolled in a beginning Martha Graham class to acquire what he lacked--basic modern dance training.

Laughing at the memory, he recalled the 8:30 a.m. Saturday sessions. “Everybody was either much younger or much older than I. Nobody was professional, and they didn’t know that I was. So I could look like a fool, and it didn’t matter. Actually, it was quite wonderful; it was a time which I had all to myself.”

Five years later Dance magazine described the result of Corbin’s hard work. His dancing, it said, was “a seamless fusion of his own classical background . . . with Taylor’s distinct modernism.”

Taylor dances are known for their athleticism--lyrical, exuberant and casual, often at the same time. It’s a strenuously demanding style that seems especially to suit Corbin.

“After 10 years in this company, my body is in much better shape than it was when I was a ballet dancer. I am much less prone to injury,” he explains, even as he rubs a leg stretched out on a chair beside him.

The New York Times once described Corbin as “mercurial”; he is indeed capable of infinite changes. Hilarious in the dueling duet of “Offenbach Overtures,” he revels in the lyricism of “Arden Court” and the sly humor of “Cloven Kingdom”--both of which were his introduction to Taylor while still at the Joffrey--as well as in all-American boy roles, whether in a World War II incarnation, in “Company B,” or as a pot-smoking Woodstock kid of “A Field of Grass.”

Expanding on the Southern California repertoire, Corbin puts “Roses,” one of Taylor’s relatively rare excursions into pure romance, into context. “He made only two pieces that year [1985], ‘Roses’ and ‘Last Look.’ In ‘Last Look’ everyone is caught in a horrible urban world. We create a sense of claustrophobia with everybody living on top of each other. In ‘Roses,’ on the other hand, it’s more like creating your own little heaven.”

In “Oh You Kid,” Taylor’s gloss on turn-of-the-century social dancing, Corbin was responsible for what he calls Taylor’s “grunt work,” researching the “animal dances”--the fox trot, the bunny hop, the turkey trot, the bear hug--that moved from the country into the cities during the Industrial Revolution. At first considered obscene because of the way partners touched each other, Corbin explains, they became smash hits in “good society” after the husband-and-wife dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle sanitized them.

“It was a trickling-up effect,” Corbin says. He dug through source material on popular culture, particularly looking at the Edison kinescopes of vaudeville dancing. “Paul knows so much already,” he says, “but I gave him the ore from which he extracted the characters and then polished the material.”

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Corbin makes no secret of his admiration for Taylor, and it’s particularly evident in the 1998 Oscar-nominated Taylor documentary, “Dancemaker.” Prominently featured, he is articulate and clearly in awe of Taylor’s gifts. At one point in the film, Taylor, who has a reputation of being hard on his dancers, lined up half a dozen of them, Corbin included, for corrections about a particular section of “Piazzola Caldera.” They look nervous, if not downright afraid.

Corbin hastens to correct the impression. “It may look like we are fearful, but we are not,” he says. “At moments like these, we just want to catch every word he says because at that point he may say something that makes the dance click for you and then, all of a sudden, it all makes sense.”

When Corbin first saw “Dancemaker,” he cried. In part, it was because of another dancer in the company, Christopher Gillis. Gillis died in 1993, and Corbin has been taking over many of his roles in the company repertory. “They were featured in the film because that’s the way the rep worked that year, and that’s why I am in the film as much. I want to do justice to him, and I don’t feel that I am quite filling his shoes. That was hard to see.”

Dancers, whose professional life revolves within three-dimensional space, are known to dislike the way images flatten as they are transferred from stage to screen. Corbin, though, is satisfied with what did and didn’t land on film in “Dancemaker,” though he still thinks it’s no substitute for seeing a live performance.

“All dance is about specific moments. On stage we take them to the extreme because it’s three-dimensional, and there is distance [to the audience]. On film you can’t do that, you have to be a little bit more contained. If we take the action too far, the audience will miss it.”

Corbin, like his fellow dancers, performs without a contract with the Taylor company. They work about 45 weeks a year, get “all the perks,” but “it’s all done on a handshake. We trust Paul, and he trusts us. It’s a double-edged sword, of course. But we won’t use it against him, and he won’t use it against us. It’s a very adult way to work; it has to do with your soul.”

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PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY, Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. Dates: 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. next Sunday. Prices: $15 to $43. Phone: (800) 233-3123.