In the 15 years Patrick Corbin danced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, he became one of the great vessels of Mr. Taylor’s choreography. In all those years, the dance that meant most to him was “Eventide,” a 1977 portrait of love and loss. So it is fitting that Mr. Corbin’s new company, CorbinDances, opens its first New York season on a theme of good-byes.

On the bill is “Forever,” a 1996 duet about the loss of a partner, and “Bathing Jeff,” a tribute in dance and text to the former Taylor dancer Jeff Wadlington. “Bathing Jeff” is danced by a cast of 12, while Mr. Corbin sits onstage, reading excerpts from the journal he kept in 1994, as he watched his longtime friend Jeff slowly dying from AIDS.

But if the subject matter sounds tragic, the dances are not. Like his former boss,Mr.Corbin is a choreographer simultaneously attracted to clouds and their silver linings. So while “Bathing Jeff” is about a man dying in the prime of his life, it is also about the profound spiritual effect the dying can have on the living. Onstage in “Bathing Jeff”- as it was in real life – the dying man is surrounded by dancers.

That close-knit community was much in evidence on a recent afternoon at the Taylor studios in SoHo, when several of the current Taylor dancers watched a run-through. While the dancers moved briskly through the choreography to Philip Glass’s stirring String Quartet No. 5, Mr. Corbin sat downstage at a school desk. Wearing a clip-on microphone, he read his own narration with the unpolished sincerity of a non-actor.

The memories described are remarkably specific. Mr. Corbin recalls the exact price of the plane tickets he and five other company members purchased to go to Arkansas to be at Jeff’s deathbed. He gives precise descriptions of his friend’s lifeless body, which he helped to bathe for the last time. These closely-observed details suggest the contours of the dancer’s life – short of cash, but rich in experience. How much more painful, then, for a dancer to watch the withering of his body.

At a time when modern dance awaits the appearance of another great choreographer, Mr. Corbin’s pedigree stands out. Before joining the Taylor company, Mr. Corbin spent four years with the Joffrey Ballet, where he was among the last dancers to work closely with Robert Joffrey. Having studied with two of the country’s most venerated dance makers, Mr. Corbin received a near ideal education.

In the first showing of his own choreography – in 2003 at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery – Mr. Corbin displayed an independent point of view. Still, there are traces of Mr. Taylor’s familiar handwriting in “Bathing Jeff” – in the finesse with which dancers are moved on and off of the stage and in a final section of buoyant full-out dancing, with a dozen dancers crisscrossing the stage at a full sprint, nearly sideswiping each other.

Yet for the most part, Mr. Corbin’s movement bears his own unique stamp. In “Bathing Jeff,” he assigns movements corresponding to letters of the alphabet, so that the performers are aware that they are forming symbols that relate to the narration. The abstraction of this task gives their movement an unusual degree of focus and attack.

In partnering, Mr. Corbin emphasizes trust, having the dancers release fearlessly into last-minute catches. In the mostly explicitly narrative sections, he arrays the dancers around a real mattress, creating postures of grief, fear, and supplication with arms, heads, and necks.

Mr. Corbin’s choreography looks sharp and purposeful on his dancers. But it’s at the end of “Bathing Jeff,” when Mr. Corbin himself rises from his chair and joins in the dancing, that the full potential of his movement is realized. On his own remarkable body, his modern steps have a more rigorous, irresistibly intense physicality.

Mr. Corbin intends to expand “Bathing Jeff”into a full-evening work. For now, he says, he will follow the model of other beginning companies, bringing together pick-up dancers on a project-by-project basis. Since retiring from dancing last March, his time is taken up with the exigencies of putting together a shoestring company, as well as teaching and setting Taylor works on out-of-town companies on the side. He gets considerable help from like-minded friends in the dance community, including his executive director, Stacey-Jo Marine. For “Bathing Jeff,” he asked cast member Tyler Gilstrap to dress the dancers in casual downtown workout gear on “almost no budget.”

Like his mentor, Robert Joffrey, Mr. Corbin also has to inspire a band of dancers to join with him. Judging from the passionate performances and the intense response to it at rehearsal, Mr. Corbin’s “Bathing Jeff” speaks directly to his fellow dancers. But he insists the point is universal. “This dance is about everybody who loses people at a young age, and how the fear you start to feel can hold you back,” he said. “What I’m saying is, ‘Don’t be afraid.'”

Joyce SoHo (155 Mercer Street, between Houston and Prince streets, 212-431-9233), June 22 to 25.