Wendy Taucher, choreographer and director, teacher and writer, and former artistic director of the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, passed away on Jan. 13, 2026, in a Boston hospital after a long illness.
She was involved in the New York theater and dance and music worlds immediately on moving to the city in 1979.
She was born on April 7, 1954, in Oak Park, Ill., and raised in Cicero. She attended Morton East High School, where she was active in the music department and started a student dance company.
“She was inspired by her mother Evalyn,” said her brother, Dean Taucher, a film production designer. “Evie was in a Doris Humphrey–styled modern dance company in the 1930s, when modern dance was a political stance, not just another style.”
Wendy graduated from Northwestern University in 1976 with a degree in music education, and minored in the French horn. While at Northwestern she founded a student-run dance company that still exists. She also met a lifelong friend and collaborator, writer Sara Plath.
Since the COVID pandemic Wendy had become the primary caregiver to her now 106-year-old mother, while coping with her own health issues. Their relationship was a seemingly inseparable bond.
“When Sara and Wendy shared an apartment in Chicago,” Dean said, “there was a minor but consistent gas leak, which led to many visits by beefcake firemen, to the delight of Sara and Wendy.
“Later in life, Wendy still enjoyed visits by the EMS when they came to assist when her mother slipped onto the floor.”
She learned early in adulthood to bear the pain of loss. “Her father Henry died in 1971, and her brother Edward died in 1977, both by suicide,” Dean said. “A music school boyfriend died in a car accident between freshman and sophomore years, and another ex-boyfriend jumped off his balcony while his fiance ate breakfast.”
She took modern dance classes in Chicago from Francis Allis, a modern dancer and choreographer, where she met two more lifelong friends and collaborators, Carol Chave and Lauren Naslund.
After graduation from Northwestern, she formed a small company, A Dance Ensemble, with a few other Francis Allis students. A Dance Ensemble performed Wendy’s choreography in the Chicago area, and on a tour of small Rocky Mountain towns in Western Colorado. Being a conservatory-educated French horn player, Wendy knew classical music intimately. The Ensemble performed her dance to Stravinsky’s “Octet for Wind Instruments” at Chicago’s Navy Pier, with a live wind octet. She incorporated live musicians into dances, and even had the dancers play instruments.
Thanks to a summer residence at Jacob’s Pillow, she moved to New York in the summer of 1979, and met and became lifelong friends with Bessie Schonberg, Lynne Taylor-Corbett, and Norton Owen.
In New York she reunited with Sara Plath and founded the Plath/Taucher Company, whose projects took them on an international circuit.
Between 1978 and sometime in the 1990s she collaborated with Plath on a number of interdisciplinary dance and theater pieces. They included two full-length works, “The Daphne Variations,” performed at MoMing in Chicago, and “Reasons for the Beginning of Delight.” The latter work premiered at the Harkness Center for Dance in New York, then was taken on a tour that included Arezzo, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; and back to Chicago. They also created a number of shorter pieces that were performed at a wide variety of Off-Off-Broadway venues, as well as pieces for young audiences. Among the repeat collaborators on these pieces were Lauren Naslund, Dean Taucher, Denise Laffer, Constance McCord, Jill Kotler, and many others.
Naslund described those works as having a unique combination of wit, biting social satire, introspection, and slapstick. At the time in the New York dance world, humor was quite unfashionable. Wendy’s response to high-minded critics was always, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!”
Which of course was itself a joke — within the humor, Plath/Taucher Company was completely serious.
Another friend and collaborator, Nicole Lee Aiossa, worked with Wendy for more than 20 years, starting with American Singers Opera Project, then working as a dancer, assistant, teacher, singer, all the way to co-director with her.
“She was my teacher, my mentor, my boss, my director, my co-worker, and my friend. Wendy was a brilliant choreographer and director … she was also a nightmare and absolutely off her rocker. She drank Diet Coke with a side of Slim Jims, wore open-toed platform clogs in the winter in New York, and would call me at 6 am to tell me some small bit of work she just thought of. She once hired me to dance around a soundstage as a beaver for a music textbook she was writing.” Aiossa’s description of working as a dancer for Wendy would be familiar to many others who worked with her.
“The first opera she directed me in was a piece called ‘Il Segretto di Suzanna,’ and I was never so happy to be in rehearsal in all my life,” Aiossa said. “She worked the hell out of me, drawing out every damn movement my body was capable of, and then made me do it again 30 times until it was even better. Anyone who has ever been in a show with Wendy knows rehearsals get long and intense, and you can spend an hour on one stupid arm gesture. But after that I was hooked. She called me Nic, never my full name, and said I was a dancer trapped in an opera singer’s body.”
Wendy also wrote reviews of dance and opera, and was a teaching fellow at Lincoln Center, where she organized a union and looked forward to breaking a few heads, an aspiration never realized.
In her personal life, she had many loves — “You know who you are,” said Dean — and was married once to a gay English aristocrat. No issue ensued, except a check and a divorce.
She was an “Auntie Mame” to her nephew Nicholas, and was beginning to reprise that role with her great-nephew Dayaan, for whom she had an all-encompassing love.
To hear the memories of her friends and collaborators is to understand the degree of loss felt by all those close to her at her passing.
“Wendy was a nexus,” said Naslund. “She got to know just about everyone of quality in the New York dance world. She coached and choreographed for gymnasts, opera singers, actors. She encouraged the careers of people in whom she recognized talent. She introduced talented people to each other, and was delighted when creativity, or friendship, or love, resulted. What Wendy said to me in the mid-80s was, ‘I want to be an impresario.’”
She came closest to that ambition when she took over artistic direction of the Yard, the performing arts community on Martha’s Vineyard, and for several years presided over performances and teaching by many East Coast and international dance companies and choreographers and performance artists.
“I still have so many questions for her,” said Aiossa. “I still want to sit next to her in a ratty rehearsal room for hours, furiously taking down incomprehensible notes. I want her to call me at some insane hour to ask some insane question, only to say ‘Thanks bye’ and hang up on me. I want to scream at her to eat a fucking sandwich and not junk food for the 1,000th time. Wendy had so many flaws, and did not have an easy life, but who the fuck does? She was a crazy bitch, and made my life miserable, and I miss her terribly right now.”
Perhaps her brother Dean says it for many others: “A swirling confluence of cultural contrasts that set her spinning, set her in a dance for life. And quite a dance. From art lived in pursuit of noble ends to heights she sought regardless of norms … inexorably, unreasonably, demandingly, yet always captivatingly her! Wendy! Director, choreographer, impresario! Dizzy till the end!”