Prince: The Immersive Experience takes music lovers on a ride
Prince: The Immersive Experience, in partnership with Bose, allows guests to create their own playlist of Prince songs. Photo credit: Superfly and Alive Coverage.
Prince: The Immersive Experience is the latest immersive, interactive experience from the company that brought The Friends Experience and The Office Experience to Chicago.
Prince: The Immersive Experience is open to the public. It debuted in Chicago on Thursday, June 9th, at 540 N. Michigan Avenue.
Guests are taken on a journey into the life of Prince Rogers Nelson, who was born on June 7, 1958, in Minneapolis, Minn. The first room features an introductory video that lets visitors know what they will see when they enter the experience.
Die-hard fans and people who are familiar with his music will enjoy seeing the artifacts, like the clothes Prince wore in videos and on tour. They’ll also learn about his life. One room has a timeline of his life and screens in that room show key locations in Minneapolis and how they connect to him.
To get the full span of Prince and his musical work, there is a discography in chronological order of all of his albums. The experience is filled with quotes from Prince.
It was said that Prince wrote a song a day. Guests can tour a replica of Studio A, where Prince recorded his music in Paisley Park. They can put on special purple headphones and work the soundboard like a sound engineer or music producer would during a recording session.
Guests can enter club Glam Slam and hear Prince’s songs, played by a live DJ, in an audiovisual dance party. Another room showcases outfits worn by Prince, another has the guitars he played, and the pink keytar Prince invented.
Because the experience is in partnership with Bose, in one part of the experience, guests can step up to screens, answer questions and a playlist will be generated they can take with them and play on their mobile phones.
The experience also showcases Prince’s fight for creative freedom and artists’ rights. There is a video compilation of interviews of Prince talking about the importance of creative freedom.
Guests also can go into a replica of the scene from “Purple Rain,” where they can see and sit on the actual motorcycle from movie.
“We’re just really, really proud of it. It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to see drawings and think about it and talk about it. But, when you walk through and you go, ‘oh my goodness,’ and you see these photos and you have these experiences, it just takes your breath away. We feel very, very good and fortunate to be able to have the gift of doing this project and bringing this project to life,” said Richard Gay, Chief Operating Officer at Superfly.
Gay felt inspired walking through the experience, hearing the music and seeing the fashion, and also felt the weight of doing the job of creating the experience and wanting to do it justice.
“Prince had so many dimensions and was so deep in terms of what he did. We could’ve done an immersive experience on “Purple Rain,” or we could’ve done something on his social justice issues, or we could’ve done something on just his fashions, but we wanted to celebrate all of the man and all that he is, that is a hefty, hefty task and we wanted to make sure we did that justice,” Gay said.
The aim was also to partner with the heirs of The Estate, because Superfly doesn’t believe in unauthorized biographies. They wanted it to be authentic and set a high bar for themselves.
Gay said that everyone who comes to the experience walks away with a sense of discovery. He has seen people’s faces light up at those moments of discovery. He also has seen die hard fans going back to moments and experience Prince in a way they never have before.
“When it comes to Prince, people feel they have that personal relationship. It was really important to celebrate the breadth of it. We’re going to tell the overall story. There’s so much more story to tell. We hope people get to experience the depth of Prince in a way they haven’t before,” Gay said.
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