The Choreography Footloose

Lynne Taylor-Corbett built the dances around a non-dancer

The choreographer of Footloose was Lynne Taylor-Corbett, a New York–based modern dance choreographer with credits across ballet, theatre, and television. Hired by Herbert Ross (in Footloose) — himself a former Broadway choreographer — she faced an unusual structural problem: her star, Kevin Bacon (in Footloose), was not a trained dancer, while several supporting parts (the bridge dancers, the line-dancing crowd at the cowboy bar) needed real movement vocabulary.

"Lynne Taylor-Corbett worked with Kevin Bacon to choreograph the dance sequences as Ren McCormack in Footloose (1984), directed by Herbert Ross." — Wikipedia, Wikipedia

Taylor-Corbett went on to choreograph the 1998 Broadway adaptation of Footloose, earning a Tony Award nomination. (hollywoodreporter)

The warehouse solo: built from four bodies

The film's signature dance sequence — Ren alone in the empty Beamis Mill, working through anger and confusion — is a montage assembled from Bacon and four doubles.

"I had a stunt double, a dance double and two gymnastics doubles." — Kevin Bacon, CNN (2011)

The dance double was Peter Tramm. The two gymnastics doubles handled the swing-from-the-rafters bar work and the jump-from-the-tractor-tire moments. Bacon did most of the standing-and-stepping work and what he could of the longer combinations. The cuts are designed to disguise the substitutions; close reviewers have catalogued every shot in the sequence by who is actually on screen.

"They disguised the fact that Kevin Bacon didn't do all his own dancing for his big solo warehouse number with clever cuts and inventive lighting." — Looper, Looper

Bacon resented this for years. The doubles, he has said in interviews, were necessary for the gymnastics — but the lighting tricks and editing patterns obscured how much of the routine he had actually done himself. Tramm was reportedly upset that he wasn't being credited; the production eventually gave him screen credit. (cnn)

The bridge dance: real dancers doing real choreography

The bridge dance — Ren and Ariel at sunset on a railroad bridge, intercut with the Loverboy/Heart power ballad "Almost Paradise" — is structurally a romance scene rather than a choreographed number, but Taylor-Corbett and Ross used it to slip in some of the film's cleanest movement work. Singer (in Footloose) had years of stage training; Bacon was working at the upper edge of his comfort zone. The cut keeps the camera close enough that the choreography reads as gesture rather than performance.

The tractor chicken race: stunt work disguised as a dance scene

The chicken race at the Beamis Mill — Ren and Chuck driving tractors at each other, Ren saved by a stuck shoelace — is a stunt sequence cut to the film's musical pulse. Taylor-Corbett didn't choreograph the tractors, but the editing rhythm follows the soundtrack rather than the action: Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero" was written by Pitchford and Jim Steinman specifically for this sequence and structures it.

"Pitchford / Steinman wrote 'Holding Out for a Hero' specifically for the chicken-race set piece." — Songfacts, Songfacts (Pitchford interview)

The Willard dance lesson: comedy as choreography

The "Let's Hear It for the Boy" sequence — Ren teaching Willard to dance in the warehouse, intercut with Rusty narrating from the bleachers — is the film's most tightly constructed comic set piece. Taylor-Corbett built the choreography around what Chris Penn (in Footloose) couldn't do, not what he could. Willard's stiffness, his counting under his breath, the slow unlocking of his hips by the end of the song — that's the choreography. The progression is timed to the song's structure: by the time Deniece Williams hits the second chorus, Willard is moving with something like rhythm.

"Taylor-Corbett paired dancers with different people and separated them into groups that would do the cowboy number and the drive-in scene." — Wikipedia, Wikipedia

The final dance: the payoff that critics said never came

Pauline Kael's complaint about Footloose was that the climactic dance the film promises never arrives. The flour-mill prom sequence is set, in Kael's reading, to be the emotional payoff — and it is, instead, brief, joyful, and structurally a coda to the council scene. Whether that choice is a flaw or a deliberate redirection of the film's energy toward the speech-as-climax is, forty years on, the central interpretive question about Footloose's structure. See Dance as Speech.