The choreographer Henry LeTang, who has died aged 91, expressed his exceptional creativity through the outstanding dancers he trained and the stage and screen musicals he worked on, most notably Francis Ford Coppola's 1984 film, The Cotton Club. Given his lack of performing experience, he had a far-ranging impact on the development of popular American stage dance; early in his career, his potential won praise from the legendary Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.
LeTang was born into a West Indian family in Harlem - his father, Clarence, came from Dominica and his mother, Maria, from St Croix. She warned her son at an early age not even to think of running wild in the streets, and, eschewing her alternative of learning the concert violin, the seven-year-old chose to take tap dance lessons. "It was for boys. I guess you could say it was very macho with the slipping, the leaps, the splits," he recalled. After endless practice and expert instruction, including some from the notable Buddy Bradley, by his mid-teens LeTang was touring with such major names as Louis Armstrong and Sophie Tucker.
No amount of hard work, though, could compensate for a body that refused to grow beyond 5ft 3in. If, like the Nicholas Brothers, LeTang had shared his height with an equally talented sibling, his career might have worked out differently. But his solitary status ruled out their Cotton Club path to stardom; he could not even join its notable male chorus line, the Cotton Club Boys. And his mother ruled out the option of moving to Hollywood to choreograph for Betty Hutton (obituary, March 14).
Ever resourceful, LeTang set up a dance studio of his own, and spent the rest of his life enabling an extraordinary array of talent to succeed on stage where he could not. By focusing on the unique qualities of other dancers, he applied this defining characteristic of rhythm tap to every form of jazz dance he was asked to teach. "It's like making a suit," he told the New York Times in 1981. "What a tailor would make for Gregory Hines, he couldn't make for me."
Through his studios passed the famous and the unknowns - the dedicated dancers such as Hines and his brother Maurice, Debbie Allen, Hinton Battle, Chita Rivera and Savion Glover; the seemingly unlikely ones including Lee Marvin, Richard Gere, Joey Heatherton, Sugar Ray Robinson and Clifton Webb; and others whose careers took different directions, although benefiting from his training - among them Lena Horne, Bette Midler, Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Billie Holiday, Nancy Walker, Lola Falana and Flip Wilson.
Building a reputation via expert training was unusual, but it worked. Fortunately for LeTang, choreographing tap dancing for the unsuccessful 1944 production Dream with Music came before tap went out of fashion in the postwar years. When interest in it revived, he got his chance with the Broadway production of Eubie (1978), a revue featuring the work of Eubie Blake, which ran for 439 performances and for which he got a Tony nomination for choreography. This success led to Sophisticated Ladies (1981), a Critics Circle award, and the opportunity to contribute to Duke Ellington's first Broadway success. The Cotton Club film followed, and although re-editing excised a great deal of reportedly superb dancing, LeTang had nevertheless made his mark. In 1989 he won a Tony award for his contribution to the Broadway revue Black and Blue, and got the chance to work with nearly all the surviving tap legends, led by Sammy Davis Jr, in the film Tap.
LeTang's third wife, Ellie Epps, had been quietly suggesting a move from New York to Las Vegas, where her husband's production of the Cotton Club Revue enjoyed a six-month run in 1985. Spurred on by New York's rising studio rents, they moved in 1991. Realistically noting that LeTang was "miserable when he's not doing anything", Ellie became manager of the new studio, catering for casino dancers and enthusiasts attracted by tap resurgences such as the hit musical Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. LeTang himself continued taking slow learners aside to help them master difficult steps and joining in practice routines while playing the piano, thus keeping alive the magic of the original music-dance core of jazz. In 1999, he told the historian of tap, Melba Huber, that his favourite pianists were "Art Tatum, Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson and Billy Taylor"; in other words, like the many steps of his dancing, he loved as many musical notes as possible.
In 2002 LeTang was one of the tap artistes to receive an honorary doctorate from Oklahoma City University. As he told Huber: "It is a milestone in my life. Getting a Tony a couple of times does not compare to the feeling that I had when I received that doctorate. We have worked and dedicated our lives to the American art of tap." LeTang is survived by his sons, Henry Jr and Jon. Ellie died in 2002.
· Henry Christian LeTang, choreographer, born June 19 1915; died April 26 2007