Paul Draper, full-length portrait, facing left, dancing

Dates: 1909-1996
Birth Date: Oct 25, 1909
Death Date: Sep 20, 1996

Place of Birth: Florence, Italy
Place of Death: Woodstock, New York

Paul Draper, tap dancer, teacher, dance director, and dance writer, was born in Florence, Italy. His mother, Murial Draper, was a hostess of the music and art world of the time; his father, was a singer of lieder in England. At the age of nine, he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and then to New York City where he lived with his mother who enrolled him in the progressive Lincoln School. He attended the Loom's Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and was enrolled as an engineering major at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, New York. By 1930, at the age of twenty-one, and having a natural flair for dancing, he applied to the Arthur Murray dance studio school and was accepted as an instructor of ballroom dance. In the winter of that year, he began his own tap dancing lessons with Tommy Nip. Both the tap dance lessons and the teaching of ballroom dance were short-lived, as Draper traveled to London, fortified with letters of introduction for his newfound career as a dancer. He was cast in and toured for twenty weeks in Sensations of 1932, performing a "flash routine" with partner Nina Ford, in which he danced on a marble pedestal. Upon returning to the states, he landed work at Cobina Wright's Sutton Club in New York. Engagements followed at the Roxy, Paramount Theatre, and Radio City Music Hall. In 1935, he appeared in the musical Thumbs Up, dancing his pedestal routine; and he partnered film star Ruby Keeler in a tap dance in the movie musical Colleen (1936). In 1942, he returned to Hollywood to make another movie with Keeler, Six Hits and a Miss.

In the mid-1940s, after studying ballet at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet, Draper began combining tap dance with the elegance of manner, precision of execution, arm movements, and turns and jumps of ballet. He soon embarked on a series of concerts, teaming with harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler. Dance critic Edwin Denby wrote about a 1944 concert: "Paul Draper combines ballet steps and gestures, as well as suggestions of Spanish and ‘modern,' with tap dancing; the result is of course a mixture. . . I only wish it worked better."

In 1948, Draper was blacklisted on allegations of pro-Communist sympathies. Unable to secure bookings for concerts during the McCarthy era, he left the United States in 1951 to live in Switzerland. Upon returning to the states in 1955, he continued to give solo performances of his dances to the music of classical composers, such as J.S. Bach and Francois Couperin. In January 1955, he appeared on a program with his aunt, the monologuist Ruth Draper, at New York's Bijou Theater. New York Times dance critic John Martin wrote of Draper, "He is dancing brilliantly these nights . . . he has developed a fabulous speed and delicacy in his feet, and the Bach "Gigue" and the [Handel] "Alcina Suite" and the charming new "Irish Jig" flash and sparkle with a crisp and musical clarity and many subtleties of phrasing and dynamics."

In April of 1955, Draper appeared in a three-act triple bill at the Playhouse titled All In One (April 19, 1955) which included Leonard Bernstein's brooding opera Trouble in Tahiti as Act I, then dances by Paul Draper as Act II, and the Tennessee Williams one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton as Act III. "Although Mr. Draper comes second on the program, let's put his first as an artist," wrote Brooks Atkinson. "He is a tap dancer. He can tap as jauntily as the next man in his humorous pieces, like the Youmans' ‘Tea for Two' and the Porter tunes for the sardonic, fantasticated, ‘In a Dance Hall.' Even in these idiomatic sketches there is a lightness of style that is very much his own."

In August 1956, Draper was again within the mix of a show titled Three for All at the Carnegie Recital Hall, and received superb critical reviews. Despite critical acclaims, an insidious form of censorship followed Draper and sometimes dissuaded him from appearing in public performances. In 1959, Draper was forced into a cancellation of a concert series in Freeport, Long Island, after protest letters from the local American Legion post were received by the Board of Education pointing out that pro-Communist sympathies had been attributed to Draper.

Draper managed to continue performing on Broadway (in the 1957 revue All in One), on the concert stage. In 1958 he performed his famous Sonata for Tap Dancers without music, and in concerts across the country in the fall of 1959 he embarked on a 45-city concert tour with partner Ellen Martial under the auspices of Columbia Artist Management). He also made literary extensions of his career as a tap dancer, by becoming a writer for Dance Magazine, for which he wrote monthly features on the art and technique of tap dance performance.

[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]