Hey, everybody, let’s dance to the music of … Sting?

When it comes to the music of Sting, choreographer and director Kate Prince lets her soul be her pilot. An acclaimed hip-hop dance maker, Prince is also one of the rocker’s longtime fans. So even though Sting is associated not with hip-hop but with pop hits that draw on jazz and world music — not to mention the reggae-, punk- and New Wave-tinged earworms of his former band the Police — Prince could not resist choreographing a dance-theater show to his music. The result is “Message in a Bottle,” a production that uses impassioned and athletic dance — popping, waacking, breaking and more — and tunes like “King of Pain” to tell a story about a refugee family. The piece bears witness to Prince’s conviction that Sting’s crowd-pleasing songs support substantive narrative and different terpsichorean modes. The music “covers so many different emotions” and is “so rich in rhythm, in instrumentation,” she points out. It provides a choreographer “the opportunity to do so many different styles of movement, styles of storytelling. It’s not all same-y, is it? Everything’s a different texture.” In the production, running at the Kennedy Center from April 9-21, the dancers depict a family’s flight from war...