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Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur dance
I feel like a bag,” murmurs Agnes Oaks as her husband carries her across the
airless studio. The ballerina is rehearsing the limpid Les Sylphides, which
she and Thomas Edur will perform with English National Ballet at Sadler’s
Wells next month, bringing an end to a 19-year association with the company
and to a remarkable stage partnership. ENB will miss them — the Estonian
dancers have been its elegant figureheads. They make a perfect princess and
cavalier, but are very different. Oaks, 39, is blonde and direct; Edur, one
year older, is dark and impish. They shine in the classical repertory:
graceful, unaffected. Edur even does a courtly little bow when we’re
introduced, feet together. Grace, however, emerges from grinding exertion.
Only when you watch dancers close up do you realise how strenuously they
work. After one ethereal variation, Oaks is panting, bent double over the
barre, while Edur simply exhales, “Jesus!” Oaks’s toe is troubling her
today, and she winces when it must bear her body’s weight. Her career has
been plagued by injury, and she admits she “can’t wait to get rid of”
dancing through pain.
Even so, insiders were surprised when Oaks announced her retirement last
autumn, still in her prime. Edur didn’t plan to follow immediately, but in
February he was appointed artistic director of the National Opera Ballet of
Estonia, in his birthplace, Tallinn; Oaks will assist him. Their final
season with ENB offered a chance to gleam in Manon, Kenneth MacMillan’s
seamy tragedy of innocence corrupted. Edur has also choreographed a piece
for the City of London Festival — the couple’s very last performance, in St
Paul’s Cathedral. I watch a snatch of rehearsal, full of minute adjustments.
“In my head, it’s perfect,” Edur muses while his dancers attempt to finesse
an intimate, squishy twist.
When they left Estonia in 1990, the Baltic state was still part of the Soviet
Union. The arts were highly valued, and getting into the state ballet school
at 10 was a big deal. It was a classic Soviet institution — Olympian
standards but minimal warmth. Oaks remembers it as “very strict — almost
sadistic. I didn’t enjoy the first year at all, I cried every day”. Her
Russian mother had longed to dance, so this opportunity seemed like “a fairy
tale, it was such a highly precious place to be. I didn’t want to disappoint
my family. I cried, but I didn’t tell them”. Their training was initially
less about the joy of dance than remorseless technical drill, which Oaks
found depressing. For all their impeccable classicism, she and Edur treat
ballet as art rather than athletics. “Very often you see people do fantastic
jumps, but it’s like exercise,” Edur complains. Oaks worries that there is
“so much emphasis on higher legs, higher jumps, more turns — Sylvie Guillems
everywhere. I’m quite happy to go”.
They came to England after winning the prize for best couple at an
international competition in Jackson, Mississippi (“A funny place to have a
ballet competition,” says Oaks, recalling the startling heat). Neither spoke
more than a few words of English, but they stayed for three months with a
couple of dancers who helpfully labelled the flat with English vocabulary.
Understanding the British sensibility took longer. Edur describes it in
terms of television comedy. “I couldn’t understand what Absolutely Fabulous
was about — I couldn’t laugh. At the beginning I really loved Hale and Pace:
this is something I could understand. But Keeping up Appearances, this all
came later.” He raises a mischievous eyebrow; it’s a shame ballet rarely
exploited his comic sensibility. Their English is now damn fine — Oaks in
particular has a charmingly crisp lilt. But, strangers in a strange land,
they’ve had to be each other’s bulwark. Each lost a mother: Oaks to cancer,
Edur to a horrific ferry accident in 1994. They are each other’s fiercest
defender, most stringent critic. You also seem to enjoy each other’s
company, I tell Edur. “Sometimes,” he says drily. But he adds, “That’s why
we stay together. We’ve been lucky we found each other early on. Sometimes,
when you have a bad row you think, why bother? Then you have to remember,
this isn’t important.”
The yellow light catches the wedding ring each wears, a double band of gold.
What makes a great partnership? Agnes considers. “First of all, chemistry.
Also to have real respect for each other. I see lots of dancers dancing
together, and they don’t really like each other. We nag and laugh and have
little rows, but that’s the way we manage. I have danced with other
partners, earlier in my career, and there were people, good dancers, with
whom I would rehearse and it never ever felt comfortable. You can try and
try, and it will never feel right.”
It’s fun to watch them jostling in rehearsal. He jokes, she sings along to
Chopin. They lean into a kiss, refracted a hundredfold by the studio
mirrors, then break the mood with a giggle. They discuss each glitch — a
lift too high, a turn too late — but Oaks claims that artistic
disagreements, however fractious, stay in the studio. “Because we’re so
close, we can be totally honest,” she says. “Of course, if I was to dance
with a person I didn’t know well, I wouldn’t say half of those things. But
we’re trying to achieve something.”
They have burnished several leading classical roles, but cash-strapped ENB has
offered them a restricted repertory. There have been flocks of Swan Lakes,
an annual sparkle of Nutcrackers. Edur finds advantages in constraint. “By
repeating them you find different depths and meanings,” he says. “Maybe in
other companies, dancers don’t dig as deep.” Oaks, however, regrets that the
searing dramatic qualities of her Manon emerged so late. “Of course I wish
we had more creative parts to dance — but at least I got to do this ballet.”
She also admits that such meaty roles would have defeated her when younger:
“It took me a couple of years to grow up, I wasn’t really mature. I was
quite shy, and in anything very charismatic or dramatic I could never step
out of myself. But that’s typical in dancers’ lives — when you feel mature,
the body starts to give up.”
Oaks says that earlier in her career she had considered taking a year out to
start a family. “I’m not going to hide [it]. But life is strange, because
then I found out that my mother had cancer. We had a very difficult year
with her being ill and suffering, and then she passed away.” The decision
was postponed, and looking at the “terrible guilts” of colleagues who
wrestle with motherhood and the touring life, she thinks she did right to
wait for retirement. Their first new responsibility will be the ballet
company in Tallinn.
This Christmas will be the couple’s first Nutcracker-free holiday for years.
Any lingering regret? Will Oaks miss giving her Sugar Plum each winter?
“No,” she yelps gleefully. “Definitely no!”
ENB’s Ballets Russes is at Sadler’s Wells, EC1, June 16-20
