Dance
For Coach Cherry, forging a career path all her own meant cultivating and uplifting her friends along the way. To do that, Cherry formed a collective of creatives reinvigorating the LA dance scene.
These days, she wears many hats: choreographer, creative director, content creator, company owner and more, but that wasn’t always the goal for Kendall Cherry, or Coach Cherry as she’s known by many. “When I was a kid I really wanted to be a construction worker,” she says, recalling her early days growing up in Virginia where her mom would bring her home toys to build houses. That early love of craftsmanship didn’t immediately translate over to dance. Instead, it was her mother who pushed Cherry into what she foresaw as her daughter’s God-given talent. Cherry was, in the beginning, resistant… quite so. “I would cry every class,” she recalls. “Even during recitals, I would sit on stage and just cry and they’d have to come and pick me up and take me off stage because I was just so scared. I just wanted to be a construction worker. I just wanted to build things.”
Her reticence to dance was part of a larger fear of connecting with others. Cherry describes herself as a quiet kid who didn’t want to be around anyone but her mother. That began to change with her dance classes where she connected with teachers and students alike, where a multitude of cultures and life experiences collapsed in a room with a shared love of movement. “That’s when I realized, ‘Okay this is kinda fun coming here and experiencing different people,’ because it was people from all over that would come to the same dance studio in Virginia.”
And then came Debbie Allen, or Ms. Allen as Cherry lovingly refers to her, her voice smoothing with reverence at the mere mention of her mentor. Cherry first met Allen when she went to audition for one of Allen’s plays at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.. Allen took an immediate liking to Cherry, not only casting her in her plays, but giving her a full scholarship to the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles and bringing Cherry on tour with her.
“She gives us life advice. Even in rehearsals she would say ‘if you’re not in this part, you better be learning what they’re doing because just in case they can’t do it we’ll need somebody.’ Just like life: You always need to be aware, you always need to be prepared for anything, any kind of circumstance.” But it was more than just life advice, she became a surrogate mother of sorts for Cherry, inviting her and others over for Thanksgiving, always able to lead by an example she herself had blueprinted. Cherry took mental notes, not just in classes and rehearsal, but in watching Allen cultivate and enrich the talent she surrounded herself with.
“If you were doing something wrong she would let you know, and quick,” Cherry says with a laugh. “She is not afraid to speak her mind. She’s been in the game for so long and still doing so much. I honestly didn’t realize how much I looked up to her until I started talking about her again right now. As I’m talking about her I’m realizing that I’m literally just following in her footsteps. I think she’s one of my biggest inspirations. With the girls that I have, I feel like all I want to do is help them and grow them and with growing them you’re growing yourself regardless. I feel like that’s how Ms. Allen thinks. Whether it be those from inner cities or those who can’t afford it, she wants to make sure that everyone has the best possible outcome in life and that’s how I feel about the girls that I have under me too.”
But how did Cherry go from dancer to choreographer to founder of Cherry & Co, a collective featuring 11 girls “booking jobs and vlogging the experience,” according to their Instagram. It began with a reality check less about what she was “good” at or more about where her heart beat the loudest. “I feel like in Virginia — or rather anyone outside of LA, really — I feel like we were all the best dancers in our cities. And then you come here to LA and it’s like everybody’s the best so you have to work even harder. I just wasn’t booking as many dance jobs and didn’t feel as comfortable dancing as I did creating. And as soon as I started choreographing it was like everything blew up for me. It was like this is what I’m supposed to do because I have such a big vision on what I want to do when it comes to choreography and I know so many people that can execute it the way I would want to.”
Things started to really churn when Cherry was asked to choreograph Da Baby’s "BOP" on Broadway in November 2019. Cherry and her friend and frequent collaborator DaniLeigh began dancing in Cherry’s living room. Thirty minutes later the choreography was complete. “That’s how we choreograph. I’ll come up with the base of what I want, maybe three or four moves, and then once I’m in the studio with the dancers it’s easier for me to choreograph the rest because now I have energy. My choreography is really collaborative because I want everyone to be involved.” The video would go on to earn Cherry her first MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Choreography. Bummed that she didn’t win (“I’m very competitive”), we remind Cherry that she’s got many opportunities to snag this and other awards down the line. But beyond awards, Cherry permeated the zeitgeist. “I mean it’s crazy, seeing football players in the end zone doing it after scoring touchdowns. We really made something iconic. Who would have known?”
It all came together following the "BOP" on Broadway video, when Cherry reconnected with two of the dancers from the video: Khaleya Graham and Samaria Stewart. “I just started using them to put choreography on and for jobs and then I brought in my friend Jahira Martinez and then all of the sudden I had a group of girls that I was constantly using. And I was like, ‘You know, let’s just make this official? Let’s have people submit so we can sign some other girls and just have our own little agency.’ Because I know how sometimes people get lost in the bigger agencies and it’s hard to really communicate with your agents or feel like you’re being seen so I wanted to have a little home since we are all already close and just make it comfortable and have them be able to tell me what goals they had and what they wanted to do. I wanted us all to be able to help each other.”
Cherry wanted it to be a place, a physical structure, for creative energy to gestate. Right now it’s dancers because that’s what she’s focusing on, but she says she hopes to grow the collective out to include photographers, directors, stylists and more. “I want everything to be flowing throughout the family.” Vlogging the experience was a way to show prospective clients that this is not just a versatile group of performers, but ones with a heartbeat, soul and tenacity. It provided a window in not just to the creatives themselves, but the creative process they entrench themselves in day in and day out.
And don’t forget friendship. The young women not only work together, they play together. “We find other things that we love outside of dance and outside of working and we do them together. We get to know each other all of the time. I feel like we have built a relationship outside of work so that when it comes to work everybody is respected and everybody knows their place. That really helps the dynamic too because the respect level is there. Everybody needs to feel respected and that what they are doing means something.” Cherry also wants to create spaces conducive to self-expression and that starts with making everyone feel seen and heard. “When we go into rehearsal with a new artist, for instance, we’ll have the first ten minutes of me and my dancers just sitting and talking and having laughs, just having some time to calm down and remove the nerves and anxiety that comes from first working with each other. That is my whole brand: to have a good time. I want everyone to feel comfortable.”
Coach Cherry’s advice for those coming up behind her, those young women and particularly those Black young women: focus, hard work and practice. The more you practice, the more confident you get because it starts to become easier and easier. “And then staying true to yourself,” she says. “Because with social media and everything going on these days it’s so easy to look at something on the internet and think “Oh my God I suck because my thing doesn’t look like that thing and they’re getting so many likes’ but you really have to be yourself and find your style and find what feels good to you and practice on that and build on that. Then you’ll be set.”
