Sting has been a singer/songwriter/musician for decades. His popularity has hit the top of the charts more times than imaginable. PBS’ “Great Performances” now sets his music to a dance performance. As David Horn, executive producer of “Great Performances” explained to a virtual group of the media, “Set to the music of 17-time Grammy-winning artist Sting, and staged and choreographed by three-time Olivier Award nominee Kate Prince, this dance theater show from London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater focuses on the international refugee crisis and today we’ll be taking a closer look at that program through a visual tale of three siblings whose village is attacked and must embark on a perilous journey to survive.”

The musician is known for several storytelling songs that have been the backdrop of so many of our lives. When asked about that, he responded, “I write songs to, first of all, amuse myself, keep myself, my brain occupied. I like to use the song form as a storytelling medium. It’s quite a difficult discipline to, you know — it’s like writing short stories. You have to get it within a certain span of time, a certain number of verses, so you can’t be too long-winded about it. So it demands a certain discipline. I like telling stories, I think, and one of the great things about this dance piece is that 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.”

When commenting on the story of this dance performance, the singer stated, “I think migration is something that human beings have done for millennia. You know, when there’s a drought, when there’s a famine, when there’s a war, we move somewhere else and, you know, the city/states are quite a recent invention in humanity. And so, you know, we are all in this situation. And so I believe that although we don’t — we cannot offer solutions, none of us know what the answer is, we all have to recognize that we’re all in the same boat.”

Let’s face it, Sting has been around for a very long time, and that is something to praise in this volatile industry.

“It’s a lovely legacy to be part of,” he acknowledged. “You know, I always feel that I’m part of a continuum of songwriters. You know, troubadours have been telling their stories throughout history, and it’s a very proud legacy for me. So you know, now that I’m an elder statesman, I have to feel good about that.”

When this interviewer questioned him about whether, after all these years, he still gets a little nervous when walking on a stage, he denied that feeling. “You know, you walk out in front of 10,000 people, 20,000 people, who all seem to be happy to see you,” he explained. “That definitely gives you a shot in the arm even if you might feel a little bit, you know, out of it just before the show. Walking on stage is a terrific blast of energy. And then it’s my job to find something new in the song, find something I haven’t discovered before, something maybe incremental that the audience may not notice, but I do, and my musicians do. We’re always looking for some novelty that we haven’t discovered. And I’m not there just to recreate something that was written 40 years ago. I’m there to find out something new about the song.”

So this “elder statesman” doesn’t get nervous. Instead, he gets energized. And quite frankly, after all this time, he is like the Energizer bunny. He keeps going. With 17 Grammy wins to his name, he is still going and is enjoying every bit of it.

Now fans of his music can enjoy the songs being played on stage in a musical dance performance. “I never thought about dance as being a medium that the songs could be translated into,” he admitted.

“Message in a Bottle” premiered Nov. 3 on PBS’ “Great Performances.”

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