Curio Dance’s new 9,400-square-foot building in Stillwater features specialty sprung flooring, natural lighting and spacious studios.

But it’s the new laundry room and storage areas in the $2.4 million building that have Curio staff really excited. “We didn’t have on-site laundry at our old space,” said Caitlin Mejia, the dance studio’s executive director. “Now we can efficiently clean costumes, ensuring they’re always performance-ready.”

Having a dedicated space for storing costumes and lighting equipment also is a game-changer, according to Mejia. “It enhances our ability to host special in-studio performances, so our new space will be a hub for creativity and seamless production,” she said.

Curio Dance is celebrating the grand opening of its new location at 1655 Washington Ave. in Stillwater from 1-5 p.m. Saturday, which is National Dance Day. The free event will feature showcase performances at 2 p.m., 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., interactive activities for children and a live DJ.

UpDown Funk, Curio’s dance class for teens and young adults who have Down syndrome, autism and other intellectual disabilities, also will perform.

Mejia and her husband, Dario, and sister-in-law, Giselle, co-own the dance studio along with Dario and Giselle’s mother, Patricia Schaber. The building is dedicated to Schaber’s parents, Viola Ahlstrom Schaber and Clarence “Lefty” Schaber, who met at the Rogers, Minn., Dance Hall and got married in 1948. “They really supported the arts and their grandchildren’s passion for dance,” Schaber said.

The foursome worked closely with St. Paul-based Lampert Architects to design the space. “Everything in here is intentional,” Caitlin Mejia said. “Take the walls of the studios. They’re not touching each other — there are hallways between them, so you don’t have that sound bleed.”

The space contains four dance studios, including one with a removable wall so it can be opened up for in-house small performances. “There’s a lot of natural lighting coming in,” Mejia said. “We have some really large windows.”

The new building’s pièce de résistance is the Harlequin sprung dance floor that flexes and bounces under impact, absorbing any shock to dancers’ joints. “It’s soft on your knees,” Mejia said.

Dario Mejia started dancing when he was 8 years old. He trained at Larkin Dance Studio in Maplewood, graduated from Mahtomedi High School in 2000 and studied dance at the Juilliard School in New York. After college, he danced with the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York, Luna Negra Dance Theater in Chicago and the Minnesota Dance Theatre.

In 2009, he and his sister, Giselle, founded Curio Dance, a professional dance company with annual performances at the Guthrie Theater and later at the Cowles Center for Performing Arts. After Dario and Caitlin moved back to Minnesota in 2015, they and Giselle Mejia incorporated the Curio Dance & School at the Valley Ridge Mall. It is a performance-based, non-competitive dance school, where they teach everything from ballet to jazz to hip hop.

“We’ve seen how dance can change people’s lives,” Patricia Schaber said. “It’s changed my kids’ lives. Dance contributes to a healthy community and a healthy place for children. I tell my kids all the time, ‘You are more than dance instructors, you are role models. They are watching everything you do.’ We let our dancers find themselves, their own style, and grow to their own capacity.”

After nearly 10 years at the Valley Ridge Mall, Curio staff are happy to have the extra room, Caitlin Mejia said.

“Space was constricting our dancers’ movements so much,” she said. “Scheduling was difficult because there was just one big room. We were just squished for about the last three years. We sorely needed more space, more room. We used to be able to do only one leap across the floor, but now in the new space we can do five.”