Top; Candice Dormon, center (with the scissors): “Every minute you spend for yourself is good for you and the people around you." Bottom: City Arts Commissioner and Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Candice Dormon spent years looking for a space in New Haven where she could take a moment for herself, and breathe just a little more freely. Now, she’s building it in Fair Haven—and hopes the city will join her to dance along.
Dormon, a small business owner and early childhood educator who runs Ekow Body Skincare & Wellness, has opened her first brick-and-mortar space in Building Two of Erector Square, where an intimate, sun-dappled studio is now home to soul line dancing, personal training and Ekow Body products like her lemony deodorant cream and lavender body serum. After opening her doors with a line dance social last weekend, she returned Monday for a ribbon cutting with artists, longtime cheerleaders, and city officials.
Currently, classes are on Mondays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m., and Saturdays at 9 a.m. (check out the schedule here). Dormon also rents out the studio for community and wellness-related events, like a book club that started there last week.
“It’s about creating space where people in New Haven can breathe, can connect, and remember that caring for ourselves is not a luxury, it’s essential,” she said Monday. “New Haven is a city full of incredible energy, talent and resilience, but it’s also a city where many of us have struggled to balance multiple jobs, family responsibilities, and everyday stresses of life … our community deserves more spaces where wellness feels accessible, joyful, and communal.”
“It’s a reminder to us all to take care of ourselves, because we can’t take care of other people if we don’t take care of ourselves,” added Mayor Justin Elicker, noting the importance of Black-owned, women-owned businesses in New Haven, and the city’s close collaboration with resources like the the Small Business Resource Center, Center for Inclusive Growth and New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (NHE3).
Dormon with Jahkeeva Morgan, director of the LAB at ConnCORP.
The path to the studio has been years—and many, many jubilant line dances—in the making. Growing up in the Bronx, Dormon saw entrepreneurship all around her. Her mom, a home health aide, hustled to sell Mary Kay in her off hours, sometimes bringing her young daughter along. Her aunts went into social services and care for the elderly; her sister now runs a halfway house.
By the time she was in high school at Choate Rosemary Hall, she ran a babysitting business on the side. After college, she sold pocketbooks while building a career around education.
“We’ve just always been a family that takes care of people,” she said, listing off a number of close family members involved in caregiving work. But self-care wasn’t always part of the discussion, and Dormon sometimes watched the matriarchs in her family stretch themselves thin.
At some point, the weight of that care work started catching up to her, too. Five years ago, Dormon was running a daycare out of her Beaver Hills home, and spending her off hours experimenting with “a bowling ball of shea butter” that she’d brought back from visiting her husband’s family in Ghana. It was February 2020, and she had just figured out a recipe for homemade deodorant, sharing it with a few friends who expressed interest. It was the first whisper of what would become Ekow Body, so named after her youngest son, Emory Ekow.
When Covid-19 hit, Dormon closed the daycare. Her sons, Emory Ekow and Lincoln Kofi, were both home, Lincoln learning remotely. Her husband, James Dormon, had torn his achilles and was debilitated by the injury. She suddenly realized how exhausted she was.
“When you’re out dancing, you’re not supposed to take off your shoes, because if you take them off, you won’t be able to get them back on,” she remembered Monday. “That was the thing. Once I sat down from the daycare, it was really hard for me to get up again.”
Ultimately, Dormon chose not to reopen. Instead, she poured herself into Ekow Body, working with a manufacturer in upstate New York to grow the business in a way that felt sustainable. What she wanted was not just skincare that looked and felt good, but a product that helped people develop a practice of self-care, even if it was 10 or 15 minutes a day.
“It opens up a whole world that’s just, ‘I’m gonna take a minute to shower and put on some body butter,” she said. She practices what she preaches: when she started taking care of her skin, Dormon found that she was eating healthier food and moving her body more.
Last year, she also started line dancing at the Dixwell Community Q House, where Xan Walker teaches each week. She fell in love with it instantly. It wasn’t just the movement, or the health benefits, or the “memory work” required of the form, she said—although she is quick to exhort all of those things. It was the community she was able to create.
Dormon brought other moms with her, excited to give them a chance to breathe along with her. She realized that “I’ve been line dancing my whole life,” with dances like the Electric Slide, the Wobble, and the Cupid Shuffle that she never thought of as line dances. She started leading dances, in small and informal gatherings like a neighborhood festival earlier this year. And in May, when a friend sent an email that a space had opened up at Erector Square, she took a leap of faith.
Now just months later, it is open to the community, with wall-length mirrors on one side of the room, neat shelves of skincare products, and a stack of cowboy hats that dancers are welcome to wear as they move (Monday, she’d stashed strength training equipment artfully under chairs). Three days a week, she opens the studio to classes, with an intention of building the schedule out based on community needs.
In her classes, soul line dances are never limited to mega hits or country music, she explained: a dancer can expect everything from R&B, soul and AfroBeats to hip hop and Caribbean music, an homage to the nations of Belize and Jamaica whence her parents hail. For her, that’s part of the magic: she keeps it interesting and fun, with benefits that range from cardio health and brain strength to community.
“I want people to feel like, ‘Whatever was happening, you had a plan to get here and you got here,’” she said. “So whatever was on your list that you didn’t get to, it’s on the other side of the threshold. Leave it there. It will be there waiting for you, but you deserve this time for yourself.”
“Every minute you spend for yourself is good for you and the people around you,” she added. “I’m a much better mom, a much better wife, and a much better person when I have had a minute to take care of myself.”
The studio, which is accessible to people with mobility issues (much of the building is not), is also open to space rentals, like a book club from Inner-City News Editor Babz Rawls-Ivy and ACES’ Kevin Walton, called “Never Without A Book,” that started up last week. A different group plans to use it for a luminary memorial service later this fall.
As people milled around the studio Monday, many re-upped on jars of body butter, sugar scrub, and tubes of thick, amber-colored serum, preparing for the cooler, dryer temperatures around the corner. Jahkeeva Morgan, director of the LAB at ConnCORP, popped over to see if she could smell the mahogany body butter before making her final purchase.
Before leaving with the body butter snuggled safely in her bag, she said that Dormon excelled in Quinnipiac University’s Entrepreneurship Academy for Minority Business Owners, which is presented in partnership with ConnCORP.
“I love seeing people evolve,” chimed in Arts Commissioner IfeMichelle Gardin, the founder and director of Kulturally LIT. When Dormon started those shea butter experiments in her kitchen, Gardin was one of the first people to start using her all-natural deodorant. Five years and many pop-ups later, she’s thrilled to see the physical studio space come to life.
“Events like this remind us that dreams and opportunity are alive and well in New Haven,” she had said just half an hour before, speaking before the ribbon cutting itself. “They show us how strong our city’s arts, culture and wellness community is, tell us of the incredible diversity of people who put down roots here, create here and thrive here.”