TEAM

For Agnė, dance is as natural as breathing. From a very young age, she would teach her friends choreographies she had created herself, so her parents had no doubt that their daughter had to dance — and already in first grade, they took her to ballroom dancing. There, the girl quickly had to face a painful reality of the world and hear the verdict that with such a non-standard figure — “a curvier bottom and thicker calves” — she would never become a professional dancer. Agnė still strongly disagrees with such discrimination and firmly believes that dance is for everyone, without exception.

The Panevėžys-born dancer returned to regular movement in her teenage years — in 10th grade, she started attending belly dance classes: “There, no one was bothered by my curves.” She has seen absolutely every film about dance and is constantly expanding her vocabulary of dance movements. Among the dance genres she has tried herself are tango, lindy hop, twerk, contemporary dance, and even Lithuanian folk dance.

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Economics at Vilnius University, Agnė moved to Denmark for her Master’s studies and finally dared to try pole dance there: “Pole dancers simply fly, and this genre had been winking at me temptingly even back when I was living in Lithuania, but I never quite dared to try it. An environment where no one knows you gives you a certain freedom to try new things — and that is how, in the autumn of 2017, I finally found myself in my first class. I remember it hurt a lot, because we were told to sit on the pole, and after the class I left tired, but convinced that I would come back. I did come back, again and again, and little by little, the time I had dedicated to belly dance was fully given over to pole dance.” While still in Denmark, she also discovered contemporary dance, and after returning to Lithuania, she simply took the initiative — in 2020, she offered to lead these unique classes at Flame.

When the conversation turns to weaknesses, Agnė is honest: “Morning sleep is something sacred to me. I can’t even go to the training sessions I love in the mornings, because neither my body nor my mind works. If I’m in a bad mood, it means I’m either hungry or I haven’t slept enough. God forbid it’s both…” Back when she was still working an office job at one of Lithuania’s largest banks, she inevitably had to wake up very early and kept dreaming that somehow, someday, this would change.

And this is exactly where Agnė’s motto, “Never say never,” proved true — in 2022, she fully said goodbye to her “office career” and devoted herself completely to teaching pole dance and creating. More about Agnė and dance can be found on her personal website: www.enga.dance