Allan Appel
Bowens, at left, with teachers Hall and Rodriguez.
Salsa’s coming to Westville — not the sauce, but the equally spicy Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Alisa’s House of Salsa.
Alisa Bowens, the founder of the award-winning dance studio, announced this week that she is moving her long-established business from its Chapel Street home for the last 15 years to new digs at 912 Whalley Ave., at the corner of Blake Street.
Bowens shows off her new keys with Project Storefront’s Slomba.
“She’s not moving out. She’s moving on,” said Elinor Slomba, the project manager for Project Storefronts, who on Tuesday night emceed a reception in honor of Bowens at the Happiness Lab, Vishal Patel’s new coffee shop at 756 Chapel St., kitty corner from the dance studio.
Bowen’s new studio, which she will be previewing with free dance lessons this weekend for the whole community during Westville’s ArtWalk, is the site of a former Project Storefronts pop-up business.
“This is a success story for Project Storefronts. To have a person with such a track record establish herself there is very heartening,” Slomba added.
Bowens said she has signed a five-year lease with the owner of the property, Thea Buxbaum, who has wanted an artist to occupy the space. “I love her. I know she’ll take care,” Bowens said.
“The new space is open and artsy and, at 856 square feet, spacious,” said Bowens. Her plan is to customize it a bit with new paint, in yellows and oranges, so that students at the current dance studio, painted in those hues, will feel at home in the new.
Bowens is a business builder, literally, and comes from a family who runs a painting and construction business in Bethany. Her mother, Millicent Bowens, who was on hand for the announcement, said that 15 years ago her daughter — then a principal in the family business — returned from a trip to Puerto Rico, where she had discovered her passion and announced that she was going to start a salsa dance studio.
“I almost dropped dead,” said Millicent Bowens. She now could not be prouder of her daughter, she added.
The grand opening for the new space is scheduled for May 23, with free dance lessons for everyone that day.
ECA student guitarist Jeremiah Brown provided some tunes.
Bowens was at pains to say that she is not abandoning the Chapel Street neighborhood — just passing the torch of entrepreneurship on to new artists and to new businesses, such as the Happiness Lab.
“It’s bittersweet. I will miss downtown, but I’ll still be connected,” she said.
That’s because once a week Bowens will be conducting a salsa class in one of the spacious back rooms of the Happiness Lab.
She gave a taste of of the lessons to Westville Village Renaissance Alliance President Chris Heitmann, who was on hand to offer support and congratulations.
A neophyte dancer, Heitmann caught his breath after the brief lesson in turning and said of the new business coming to his neck of the New Haven woods that it will be great for passersby by to look up and see dancing behind the windows.
“She’ll be anchoring the end of Westville Village,” he said.
Bowens’s dance studio marks another Nine Squares business moving to Westville. Only last week, Neville Wisdom LLC opened an expanded dress-making studio in space across the street from what will be Alisa’s House of Salsa.
Also on hand to celebrate were two of Bowen’s top teachers, Frank Hall and Francesca Rodriguez. Rodriguez, 21, began dancing with Alisa at age six, just when Bowens’s studio opened, and hopes to follow in her mentor’s business footsteps in the not too distant future.
Hall said he discovered Alisa’s studio one day when he looked up to see Alisa’s students dancing in the second-floor space above Chapel Street and the former Foot Locker store, where his son was working at the time.
After his son, whom he was raising alone, enlisted in the Army, Hall said he began to eat a little more than he should. He put on weight.
Why not go on upstairs to the dance studio, take some lessons, and stay fit?
“I asked Alisa for lessons, and the rest is history,” said Hall, who has been one of the studio’s top instructors for eight years.
The move to Westville will be a kind of returning home for Hall, who grew up in the area. “Where the studio is, used to be the Westville Theater,” a movie house, he recalled.
Between the preview of the pre-renovation space this weekend at Westville’s Art Walk and the grand opening on May 23, Bowens said she is going to choreograph some special moves for the occasion.
“I’m going to create the Westville Shimmy and invite everyone to my home,” she said.