She went from village hall to Sting/hip hop impact

Like many small-town kids, Kate Prince dabbled in dance and music.
In a village hall in England, she tried ballet and tap and modern dance. In her family’s garage, she played an electric keyboard, mastering a Sting song at 11.
“‘Every Breath You Take’ is the first song I learned to play fairly well,” she said, in a Zoom press conference with Sting.
Lots of kids might try such things, but Prince never let up. Now, 38 years later, PBS has “Message in a Bottle” (shownhere) her dance piece done to the music of Sting. That’s 9 p.m. Nov. 3 on “Great Performances,” which a week earlier (Oct. 27) has a more-traditional dance concert by the New York City Ballet.
There’s nothing traditional about Prince, whose choreography ripples with hip hop moves. We might not expect that from a village lass, but she grew up on MTV and, especially, Janet Jackson.
“All of my foundation training has been in hip hop styles – breaking, popping, locking, house dance, whacking,” she said. Then she blends that with other modern-dance moves.
Sting, for one, knows that the arts can spring from anywhere. The son of a milkman and a hair dresser, he grew up near a shipyard in Newcastle.
“It’s a seaport like Liverpool, very similar working-class,” he said. The Beatles emerged from Liverpool “a decade ahead of me and conquered the world with their songs. So it gave permission to a whole generation of people behind them to at least try.”
He was a teacher for a couple years. “You’re there to show enthusiasm for something – a poem or a painting or an equation.”
At 25, he moved to London and became the principal singer and songwriter for The Police. The group hit No. 1 in Great Britain with “Message in a Bottle,” “Walking on the Moon” and “Every Breath You Take” and came close with many others. It won six Grammys, but broke up after seven years, as Sting plunged into acting and wide-ranging music styles, winning 11 more Grammys.
And yes, some people suggested his songs could be turned into a show. “There’s a pejorative term, the ‘jukebox musical,’ where songs are kind of shoehorned into a story,” he said. That “seems a little cheesy to me.”
What Prince had in mind, however, was different. The idea began, she said, at her wedding.
“‘Walking on the Moon’ was the song that the band and the congregation and my family all sang together. So it had a real deep, personal impact on me. And it was on my honeymoon that I was hanging out with my husband on the beach, listening on my headphones to ‘Walking on the Moon.’”
That’s when Prince decided to pitch the idea of a piece backed by Sting songs.She developed a passionate story in which a family is shattered by troubles in its homeland and forced to go through the agony of being refugees.
The result clicked quickly with Sting. “They’ve woven my songs into a sort of meta narrative, which also reflects my own feeling about the world and this crisis that we’re all facing,” he said.
One step involved re-recording the songs – a few with female singers, most with Sting. That included “Roxanne,” more of a challenge, perhaps, than when he recorded it 44 years ago.
“I have to sing it every night (in concerts) and I have to sing a high C,” he said. “It’s a little bit like a high jump. I have to prepare for it.” He was jumping into his musical past, and into a modern blend of hip hop, pop and the global refugee crisis.