"I got really inspired and thought, how does the practice [of dance] interact with a community? I thought, I'd like to have a go at that fellowship, but I need to change the lens of my practice," Pringle, the 2011 Caroline Plummer Fellow in Community Dance, says.
"It made a real shift in my thinking about how you connect with communities, because I think in some ways contemporary dance has lost its audience, so how does it reconnect? How does it have relevance in different communities?"
She and fellow dancer Kilda Northcott devised their first community dance piece, Lily, in 2009 under their Bipeds umbrella. It is about Lily Stevens, who taught generations of Dunedin dancers, and includes current dance students of all ages.
For her fellowship project, Pringle wanted to work with the wider St Kilda and St Clair communities and find ways to bring dance into the community and express the ocean environment.
The idea was inspired by a poem Plummer wrote about finding solace and strength for her battle with cancer by walking along the beaches at St Kilda and St Clair.
Since the beginning of her fellowship in February, Pringle has worked with the children and staff at Forbury School on dance and oceanic themes.
All the pupils, staff and support staff at Forbury School became involved at some level. She taught dance to all the pupils and the whole school focused on oceans as their topic last term.
"I went out to the aquarium with one class and as I was watching the kids experiencing the aquarium, I was thinking, this wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for the fellowship and Caroline's words in the poem.
"I enjoyed the challenge and it's been amazing to be out at Forbury with it navigating its way through all the disappointments and challenges there, and dance offering the possibility for a really celebratory outlet."
At the end of the term they had a big showing and dance. A smaller group of pupils who practised after school are to be part of her major concert, Ocean Wave.
A music and dance event celebrating the St Kilda and St Clair communities and involving many different community groups, it takes place at the King's and Queen's Performing Arts Centre tomorrow evening.
To create the event, she has worked with the surf life-saving community - surfing's a dance, she says - and individuals such as environmentalist and photographer Nic Reeves, local dancers and the St Kilda Brass.
Under conductor Davey Boyes, the brass band is performing several pieces with a sea theme, including Fantasy on British Sea Songs, Three Jolly Sailormen and a medley from Titanic.
Other local dance groups are involved, including Rasa Dance company, Pretty Gay Productions, Aha Dance Collective and Akeake Theatre, with Kilda Northcott doing a guest spot.
Producing an event such as this is like giving birth, she says.
"As the years go by, I have more trust in my capacity to deliver things, though I still get anxious." In founding Bipeds, Pringle and Northcott had a clear manifesto - to remain visible as mature dance artists, Pringle (54) says.
"As you get older, it's easy to disappear, and we are still creating a future for ourselves. We are the first generation of people trying to forge a career in contemporary dance and all the different facets of it. A few of us are still dancing.
"As I've got older, I realise I am an athlete, really, and that passion to be physically engaged isn't diminishing with age. If anything, it's becoming more precious as I get older. It's really fascinating to be in an ageing body and to be still working quite dynamically."
"Other people who are athletes, marathon runners and so on - they don't stop having a physical existence, so I can't imagine just never doing it. These days, I have a really strong yoga practice, which is what keeps things together," she says.
"[An ageing body] is such a dynamic thing and constantly changing, so the joints have to be really nurtured and I have to keep reassessing the way I'm moving, but the body still feels very expressive.
Working to the edge of possibility without hurting the body - it's such an intricate kind of dance. There's a sense of you have to be fully present with what's available in your body."
Pringle grew up in Dunedin. She learned ballet from the age of 6, but was switched on to modern dance in her teenage years by a class with John Casserley, one of the early teachers of modern dance at the School of Physical Education.
"There was an intelligence in it I didn't find in ballet. I was not a ballerina. I was already struggling with the balletic thing because I didn't really have the body for a balletic form. I suppose I was still really passionate about dancing but looking for a form that was more accommodating."
She studied dance at the School of Physical Education at Otago University and says she is the first Caroline Plummer Fellow to have done so.
It was one of the few dance schools in a science department and that meant it approached things differently from other dance studies departments, she says.
"That's always been the really great thing about the phys ed school - it has this commitment to dance. It comes from Philip Smithells, who developed the programme and was a very switched-on thinker and could really see the benefit in dance in terms of physical education, so all the students here do dance.
"It's great to be surrounded by phys ed students, some of whom have never danced before, experiencing dance.
"I was lucky to study dance here because it approached things differently - those broader things like getting a great anatomy and physiology course, biomechanics, and pedagogy too - really learning the art of teaching. I really valued those things."
After graduating at the end of 1976, Pringle danced with Impulse Dance Company for two and a-half years then went to New York to study.
Since then, she has been freelancing as a dancer and choreographer and doing her own work, although for 12 years she was head of movement at Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School.
Pringle, who is based in Wellington, has several other projects on the go for when she finishes her fellowship.
She and Northcott have performances of Lily scheduled, and they are developing another idea.
She is about to undertake an oral history project on Maori and Polynesian men who have forged a path for themselves in contemporary dance, and is planning a community dance project for the inaugural dance festival in Wellington next year - and she wants to go to Europe as well!
Catch it
Ocean Wave, an event celebrating the St Kilda and St Clair community through music and dance with an oceanic theme, is at King's and Queen's Performing Arts Centre (270 Bay View Rd, Dunedin) tomorrow at 7.30pm.
