Sherema Fleming was only 4 years old when her mother enrolled her in classes with a local nonprofit dance company. Decades later, Fleming runs her own.
That early experience of soaking up applause onstage left a lasting impression. “It was such a mind-boggling, eye-opening experience,” she said. “You feel like a superhero as this little kid.” From that moment, she was hooked — not just on dance, but on the way it could transform a young person’s sense of self.
Cost of entry to dance
However, growing up in New York, Fleming soon learned hard lessons about access. When the community dance program ended, her parents were unable to afford dance classes.
“You shouldn’t be paying $1,000 for a dance class,” she said. That inequity stayed with her. Even as Fleming pursued nursing, she kept imagining a space centered on joy and culture instead of perfection. She told herself she would someday open her own free or discounted, donation-based dance nonprofit for youths.
Fleming taught her first dance class in college, in Baltimore. Her sorority sisters were her first clients. In 2009, she officially launched Cultured Movement as a community dance and fitness class in Midtown Manhattan for working women. The adult program was fun, accessible and just five dollars a session. The model was sustainable enough to cover rent and still profit.
By 2013, she made good on a long-standing promise: to create a version for kids that removed financial barriers entirely. The youth program began with completely free classes and branched off as a non-profit subsidiary called Cultured Kids, now Cultured Movement Kids.
Funding a sustainable path
However, when expenses grew, Fleming knew she had to find a new model without abandoning her mission to build access. She started with raffles; her students would sell the tickets to help raise funds for their classes.
Later, after launching her vegan pastry business, Cocoa Vegan Pastries, she saw a better path: from raffles to cookies, like “those Girl Scout cookies everybody loves,” she said. Families could now sell vegan pastries instead of paying tuition, or simply donate if they preferred.
Today, Cultured Movement offers low-cost, donation-based classes across the city. They’re held in donated or rented community spaces like schools and recreation centers. The summer dance program for youths ages 6 through 12 — now open for enrollment — takes place in Midtown Manhattan, at 305 West 38th St. Sometimes classes for youths and adults take place at her own former high school, Monsignor Scanlan in Throggs Neck, now equipped with a professional-grade studio. “I’m a Bronx girl, so I love it,” she said.
“For the Culture” is more than a showcase
On Aug. 23, Fleming and her students will put on a performance called “For the Culture” at the Ailey Studios on 405 W. 55th Street. The phrase runs through everything she teaches, not just the annual recital.
Classes begin in a circle, with students sharing personal stories. They’ll chat about what they’re listening to at home. She’ll ask the kids what they eat, and they’ll say collard greens, and somebody else might eat callaloo, or coquito, eggnog, she said.
“It’s cool to show us how similar we all are, how connected we all are,” Fleming said. “Just growing up in New York is just like a culture within its own culture. You can go anywhere else … and you can still take a little piece of New York and any other place and culture.”
Dancing across the globe
One week, students might explore the history of Afrobeat; another, they’re tracing Latin dance styles back to their Caribbean roots. Fleming makes sure kids understand where the movement comes from and what it means.
Fleming once brought in a giant map of the world to help her students visualize it. She always wanted one of those globes since she was in the third or fourth grade, she said. “I was so fascinated by the globe and the world and how big it is.”
After a trip to Haiti, she returned with handmade bookmarks created by women in local villages and passed them out during class. A few of the kids were Haitian, so it was a small way to make it tangible. She encourages her students to keep that curiosity alive: “When you go to your country, bring us something back.”
“Community over choreography”
This ritual of storytelling builds bonds. Some of her earliest students have grown into paid junior instructors, guiding warmups and leading choreography. She brings in professional dancers — one even performed with Beyoncé — to show students what’s possible.
However, career training is secondary. Her real focus is confidence: “It’s community open choreography,” she said. “So if someone can’t do a plié or a split or an eight-count, it’s okay.”
She shudders at the reality TV shows about dance moms yelling at little kids. “It’s about confidence in the studio, confidence on stage,” she said. “And it’s about movement — everybody moves differently … Your dance move is your dance.”
A full-circle moment
Her very first performance, decades ago, took place at Harlem Hospital, where she danced for patients in the pediatric unit. Later, she returned to the same hospital for her first job as a nurse.
She then came full circle again by bringing her own students to perform for children there. It brought back memories of the kids, colors and music, the audience’s excitement and getting lollipops at the end of her performance as a young girl. The experience also let her bring her two worlds together.
“Being a nurse, I’m so used to different things that hospitalization brings — like wheelchairs, IV poles, catheters,” Fleming said. “So it was nice to tell them, ‘it’s okay, you can touch her. That’s not gonna hurt her if you touch her arm.’”
Explaining this to her students brought a deeper level of awareness to both the kids and the space itself, she said.
Burning out and back on the dance floor
By 2014, the demands of running a nonprofit, working full-time and growing a small business caught up with Fleming. Burned out and overwhelmed, she drafted an email announcing that Cultured Movement was shutting down. But that was short-lived. The messages she received from families — and the sense of loss she felt herself — convinced her to return.
“It wasn’t the end,” she said. “I took a break, and when I came back to it, I felt like … this is where I’m supposed to be.”
Since then, she has learned the dance to what she calls the “longevity of entrepreneurship”: time management and the art of adapting, including finding venue locations. “When things get difficult, when things look different, you have to pivot,” she said. “That’s growth — that’s embracing change, and that’ll keep anyone alive and thriving, any entrepreneur, you have to learn how to be flexible, move, shake, pivot.”
Now, more than a decade in, Fleming continues to run the program with the same mission of making the stage that much more within reach for young girls. “Sometimes you’re just blessed and pushed by something that’s outside of you,” she said. “This is God’s plan.”
One of her Cultured Movement students is heading to college this year. “I’m looking at her pictures when she was six, seven years old, and … these moments are so endearing,” she said. “Seeing these kids grow and being a part of their lives is just magical.”
The youth summer dance program will culminate in a showcase on Aug. 23 at the Ailey Studios on 405 W. 55th Street from 3 to 5 p.m.
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