COVINGTON -- Baba Brinkman is sitting backstage with the lights set low.

Steady rap beats fill the auditorium of Alleghany High School as juniors, seniors and drama students shuffle inside.

"I just hope I get the full hour and that I don't get cut off by the bell," says Brinkman. The bell is one of the challenges of performing literary rap at schools. It can cut you off in a second right in midverse.

Brinkman is here to perform "The Rap Canterbury Tales," his one-man theater show, that fuses his two passions: rap music and Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century literary masterpiece.

Brinkman, 28, walks onto the stage, which is framed by velvety maroon and aubergine curtains. Medieval music fills the auditorium as Brinkman begins to perform with a British accent. He stops.

"Wait a second, this is not working. You guys have no idea what I'm talking about," he says.

The rap beats return and Brinkman's performance of "The Rap Canterbury Tales" takes off. In his show, Brinkman transforms Chaucer's pilgrims into modern day rappers.

Brinkman says that audiences are often divided about his performance. "I think if everybody loved it, there would be a problem with it," he says. "If everybody hated it, there would be a problem with me."

Hailing from Vancouver, Canada, Brinkman began rapping at the age of 19. While completing a master's degree in Medieval and Renaissance English literature, he wrote his thesis about the connection between rap music and literary poetry.

In the spring of 2004, Brinkman founded his own company, Babasword Production. Despite having no formal acting training, he took his show on the road, performing in seven world cities that summer. By that fall he had produced his first CD, "The Rap Canterbury Tales."

He has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world's largest arts festival, and has toured schools in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the U.S.

Brinkman has also produced two other CDs, "Sword Play" and "Lit-Hop," as well as a book titled "The Rap Canterbury Tales," which was released in September.

Donna Beirne, an English professor who teaches Chaucer, organized Brinkman's performance at Alleghany High School. She thought his music was "amazing" and said she would do whatever it took to get him to Virginia.

At the school, Brinkman acts out various characters from Chaucer's original.

He first appears as the Pardoner, saying, "I have a song for the salvation of your souls." He raps about greed, evil and vice.

Then, Brinkman acts as Miller, a drunk whose name comes from the beer. "My style is like Ol' Dirty Bastard. I like it raw," he says.

Then Miller continues to rap about the story of Nicholas and Allison, who cheats on her husband and takes "a chance to get busy in original sin."

Chaucer's Wife of Bath also makes an appearance, saying, "Lil' Kim ain't got nothin' on me." The character raps about a knight who searches for the answer to what will satisfy women.

Another male student says to a classmate, "Damn, I'm going to take my test on this?"

The heart of Brinkman's performance comes when the rappers call on the show's narrator to do a freestyle rhyme titled the "Rhyme Renaissance."

In five minutes, the narrator describes how rap derived from all of the great oral storytelling traditions: the troubadour in Europe, the griot in Africa, the Aztec poet in Meso-America. He mentions Homer, Virgil and Chaucer, as well as rappers starting out in the Bronx, N.Y., during the 1970s. He describes them all as "poets battling with their words instead of their fists."

Hannah Grimesey, a 15-year old sophomore, said, "It's cool to see that even in such a back of the woods mountain sort of place we like it."

After the show, three teenage girls huddle around Brinkman, peppering their language with "awesome" and "sweet." One girl asks Brinkman about his black T-shirt. It has a picture of Chaucer with sunglasses. "I think he was made for hip-hop," he says, as the three giggle.