Her energy was massive and incessant; her enthusiasms electrifying; her criticisms commanding. She could be almost terrifying, Dora Stratou, until her face broke, as it often did, into a generous smile that could warm a room and a deep-down laugh that could fill it.
Dora Stratou, founder of the Greek folk dance company which has become famous both here and abroad and bears her name, died in Athens on January 19 after a long illness. She was 84 years old.
A woman of extraordinary energy, vision and persistence, she devoted her life to the preservation of the Greek tradition often against obstacles which would have defeated a less dedicated spirit.
She was reared in a privileged and artistic environment. Her father, Nikolaos Stratos, was a rising young politician, with a lively interest in music. Her mother, a singer and pianist of accomplishment, was the daughter of the playwright Dimitrios Koromilas. Towards the end of the 19th century he had introduced onto the Athenian stage a style of comic operetta with a strong and realistic element of folklore that became enormously popular. So Dora’s four life-long passions – in piano, song, theatre and dance – developed early.
This idyllic existence, however, ended abruptly. Her father was a minister and then prime minister during the ill-fated Asia Minor campaign in 1921-22. In the general panic that followed the disastrous defeat, Stratos and five other respected statesman were court-martialled by a revolutionary committee and executed. Dora was then barely 19 years old. Her mother, left with a modest pension, accompanied her daughter while she studied music and singing in Berlin, Paris and later in the United States; and gave concerts and music lessons to make ends meet.
Back in Greece in the late 1930s, Dora became closely associated with Karolos Koun whose Art Theatre, founded during the most destitute years of the war, became a milestone in the renaissance of the modern Greek stage. Its strong use of Greek folklore in revivals of ancient plays was one of its most revolutionary aspects. Dora was the organization’s first general secretary and during the occupation worked as a volunteer in children’s war relief. Yet as she approached the age of 50 she had not found her true vocation.
Later, in her autobiography, she wrote: “It was right after the occupation when various foreigners began asking me the same, classical question: Who are you Greeks? Of course you have no links with the ancient Greeks; not after all these centuries. That would be incredible.’ And that was when my agony began. How could we demonstrate to the world of today; how could we answer this question, ‘who are we?’ How could we best find the continuous history of our country? Only in popular dance and demotic song.”
It was during a performance of a Yugoslav folk dance company visiting Athens in 1952 that the future of her life was decided. With her customary impetuosity she called all of her well-placed friends that same night and told thorn of her decision. If the Balkan countries could make such a success of popular dances with often a Greek base, why couldn’t Greece do it and better; with greater authenticity?
She pawned the remains of the family jewels. She organized an association. The following year it took the name of the Society of Greek Dance and Song. She then stormed the redoubtable gates of Greek bureaucracy with, at first, about as much success as Don Quixote versus the windmills. But she would not be put off. In 1959 she began summer performances among those scattered stones euphemistically known as the ancient threatre of Piraeus. Then she got a year’s grant to perform in the garden of the Theseion. Then she got a state subsidy. Then it was withdrawn.
The obstacles were staggering. Performances were a necessity. She needed the publicity; she needed a foreign audience; she needed money. For the most important thing, she well knew, was that a tradition in jeopardy had to be preserved.
Dora Stratou was not a dancer herself nor a choreographer. She had only her own fine musical training and her own faith in the preciousness of tradition. She travelled all over Greece. She recorded music and dance patterns, started archives, collected instruments and costumes which then had to be copied accurately at great cost. As a juggling act it was a virtuoso performance. She had to arouse the interest of middle-class people for whom anything ‘folkloric’ at that time was despised; she had to appeal to ‘package’ tours to fill her theatre and get money out of the Tourist Office. She took her company all over Western Europe, North America; the world. Her ‘invasion’ of India was said to be the most successful Greek venture in that direction since Alexander the Great. When the junta appeared, she had a new set of problems which were solved for a few years by the Ford Foundation. It was never due to luck. It was due to persistence and the admiration she gained by that combination of idealism and tenacity which was an essential part of her character.
In the last few decades the intrinsic value of the popular tradition has at last been recognized at the moment it was about to be lost. Today the Dora Stratou Theatre on Philopappos Hill is almost a part of the ‘Establishment’. It was not always so. As the ties with the West grow tighter and the 1992 EEC economic integration looms closer, Greeks of today have come to realize that their very identity in the future must be linked with Romiosini – not just ‘modern’ Greece but the nation as it has specifically evolved over the centuries to become what it is through a heritage that has been continuously passed on and to whose preservation Dora Stratou so significantly contributed.
