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SIXTEEN years ago, when dance instructors Melvyn and Nancy Low were taking lessons from former world dance champions Lindsey and Stephen Hillier, they had a hard time getting to the studio.
The British ballroom dancing legends taught from their home in Woking town in south-eastern Britain. To get there from their London hotel, the Lows had to travel two hours every day by train, bus and taxi.
Mr Low remembers once telling his instructor: 'It's really difficult to get to your place.'
Mr Hillier replied: 'When you are good enough, they (the students) will come.'
That self-assured comment stuck in Mr Low's head when he was looking for a cheap place to start his own dance studio in the 1990s.
Mr Low and his wife were, after all, regional dance champions. Mr Low's father Sunny Low and grandfather Low Poh San were also local dance legends.
In 1993, the young man turned his back on the standard shopping centre dance studio and chose instead to set up shop in a bomb shelter beneath a Bishan apartment block.
Bishan was his only choice, he says, because the other bomb shelters available for lease had unwieldy columns and stairwells blocking the dancing space. Rent for the 2,200 sq ft space was about $2,400 a month, a mere fraction of what other dance studios would have to pay.
Bishan back then was not the pricey suburb it is now, but a former burial ground where new HDB blocks were built. The fact that his dance studio was located in the basement made it even worse for faint-hearted dance enthusiasts.
'Everybody thought I was crazy,' he recalls. 'People who dance would want to be seen in a shopping centre. Some of the dancers were rich, they didn't want to be seen in an HDB estate.'
As a result, he had 'very few' students in the beginning.
Fast forward 16 years, and the Lows now have a thriving business. Mr Low, now 43, says their reputation spread by word of mouth.
He coaches competitive dancers from South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia, and was most recently credited with the success of Filipino dancers who went on to become South-east Asian Games medallists.
While coy about the number of students they have, the Lows let on that they charge $80 an hour for private lessons. They are also taking large groups of Singapore Management University students at an hourly rate of $4 for each student.
Mr Low, who danced professionally for 19 years before retiring in 2004, now judges for local and international dance events such as the Asian Open Professional Dance Championships.
Although his studio is going strong, he says there are still challenges that come with operating in a bomb shelter.
Some students get lost. Getting to the studio requires navigating past clunky industrial-strength doors at the void deck and descending a long flight of steps, which is no mean feat when some residents nearby still have no clue that a dance studio operates beneath their block.
Mrs Nancy Low, 41, says: 'You'd be surprised. When some of my students ask people at the senior citizens' corner just outside 'Where is the dance studio?', they tell my students they don't know.'
Also, the bomb-proof walls of the studio are so thick that some students cannot get a phone reception there.
Still, these are just minor inconveniences for the Lows' students.
If you are good, they really do come.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
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