Choreographer and dancer Erin Gottwald ’98 joins rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 to lead longstanding Short Term unit “Tour, Teach, Perform,” in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools. Video produced by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College.

More about ‘Tour, Teach, Perform’

For the second year, the theater and dance department at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College and the local arts agency L/A Arts have teamed up to bring the dance program “Tour, Teach, Perform” to local elementary schools in May.

A course created by ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in 1973, “Tour, Teach, Perform” brings ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students to public schools in the Lewiston-Auburn region every spring to offer a performance and an arts lesson.

This year’s performance piece is “Welcome to Illyria (a 12th Night Story),” a multidisciplinary adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” The piece was written by Postell Pringle and created by Pringle, choreographer Erin Gottwald and L/A Arts’ director of arts in education, Joshua Vink, who is teaching the course.

“Tour, Teach, Perform” will travel to 11 schools, presenting performances to more than 2,300 students and workshops to more than 1,400. The visits began May 8 and continue through the 23rd. Please note that the school performances are not open to the general public.

Postell Pringle ’98, center rear, and his classmate Erin Gottwald (in green) led these students in creating a piece for the 2013 “Tour, Teach, Perform” unit.

Pringle and Gottwald are performance collaborators and members of the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ class of 1998. Pringle is a playwright, hip-hop artist-producer, actor and director. He is one of the four Q Brothers, a troupe that creates new musicals, recordings and multi-disciplinary productions using the tools of hip hop.

Pringle recently played the title role of the Q Brothers’ acclaimed multimedia production “Othello: The Remix,” presented in Chicago, London, Germany and Edinburgh. He has performed on and off Broadway, in film and in such television programs as “Rescue Me,” “Law & Order” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, has worked throughout the United States. She has taught dance for more than 15 years, and since 2005 has taught at Spoke the Hub Dancing in Brooklyn, where she is co-director of the Young Artists Program and producer-curator of the annual performance series, Gowanus Guest Room.

“Tour, Teach, Perform” is a course presented annually during ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝’ five-week spring Short Term. Students create a production and learn how to teach an arts lesson to K-6 graders. When they visit the elementary schools, they perform their show and then fan out to teach a 45-minute lesson in 10 classrooms, giving the pupils a chance to explore the elements of performance for themselves.

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is an important partner in the arts in Lewiston-Auburn, with hundreds of performances open to the public on campus each year and multiple partnerships off campus. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is also home to the internationally renowned ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Dance Festival, which offers six weeks of performances on and off campus by recognized artists from around the world, as well as the Youth Arts Program for young people from the region.

L/A Arts is the designated arts agency for Lewiston-Auburn. For “Tour, Teach, Perform,” L/A Arts has provided outreach to the local schools and supported transportation and accommodations for Gottwald and Pringle, who were in residence for the first two weeks of Short Term.

Postell Pringle ’98 (left, as Othello) and GQ (Iago) face off as Iago’s plot unfolds in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello: The Remix.” Photograph by Michael Brosilow.

Rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 is winning rave reviews for his star turn this spring in the title role of Othello: The Remix at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

In March, Time Out Chicago named Pringle its Performer of the Week. In a Time Out Q-and-A , he discussed how working in theater at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ sharpened his delivery as a rapper:

“My approach to the actual attack of the line and getting punchlines and the arc of the storytelling within the song was all different. I realized that it had to do with the fact that I had just been working on acting, working on playing characters. … I wouldn’t be as good of a rapper if I hadn’t spent all that time working on just acting and just theater.”

Othello: The Remix was adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy by the Q Brothers — aka GQ and JQ, who with Pringle and a fourth member are also members of the rap group the Retar Crew. The entire Crew performs in The Remix.

The Q’s modus operandi, previously exercised on such works as The Bomb-itty of Errors, is to render Shakespeare’s entire text as rhyming couplets suitable for rap delivery. The Remix re-imagines the title character as “a hip-hop mogul whose life falls apart when he makes Iago the opener’s opener on a new tour,” writes Time Out blogger Oliver Sava.

“To cut to the chase: Othello: The Remix — the 90-minute, lightning-fast, hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of jealousy and self-doubt — is absolutely brilliant, and immense fun,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss.

With ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ classmate Erin Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, Pringle returns to campus this spring to lead the longstanding Short Term unit Tour Teach Perform, in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools.

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