“Everything about dance is spiritual,” says dance studio Nude Floor founder Shayna Cua. “The way we freestyle and the body allows you to connect with something deeper, beyond yourself is spiritual.” “I refuse to call it a safe space,” says Shayna Cua of the dance studio she founded, Nude Floor .
With deep respect to the dancers she’s welcomed to the creative grounds in Makati, she refuses to dictate what is spiritually sacred, and what is sanctuary. Instead, Cua sees the studio as a canvas for endless exploration. Together with her husband and co-founder Byron Hontiveros, the two began to curate for a community that required both stage and refuge.
Crediting Japan’s art island, Naoshima, as inspiration, Shayna and Byron recounted the sense of space and how the spirit of creativity instantly invaded all senses upon entrance. “It didn’t feel empty,” says Cua, “not even cold. It felt like the space was made deliberately for the art it was showing.
” A full immersion. It was this warmth that the couple sought to capture through intentional design in Nude Floor. The studio walls are artfully painted, a backdrop for the sway of limbs and warm bodies that dance before it.
The floor curves onto the walls, right up to the ceilings—in an ode to the entanglement of beginnings and ends. “People warned us about calling it Nude Floor,” says Hontiveros. A quick Google search would betray the reasons for such well-meant warnings.
But while “nude” was initial.