[Coverage of a new exhibition that celebrates and recreates elements of the life and work of the artist and activist Prince illustrates what seems to be an accelerating trend toward immersive experiences designed to evoke various forms of presence. Some of the features and origins of the trend are explored in the story from the San Francisco Chronicle below (see the original version for six different images). For more resources on this topic see the websites for the VR Immersive Experiences Catalogue of The Institut Français and the Immersive Experience Catalogue of the Immersive Experiences (IMEX) Lab at Penn State University. For details about the Prince exhibit see image-filled stories from Block Club Chicago and Ultimate Classic Rock; here’s an excerpt from the latter:
“Vroom, vroom. It’s dark and smoky – no filter necessary – and for a moment, it’s 1984. All that’s missing is Apollonia. Today, you’re the star of Prince’s musical drama Purple Rain, and Instagram is still 26 years from existence. Nostalgia reigns.
In reality, it’s 2022, and you’ve just ducked into a storefront on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue to remember the man and his legacy. Hopefully, you’ve brought along an Instagram spouse. If not, the staff at Prince: The Immersive Exhibit – presented by a partnership between Superfly, the production company that also brought The Office and Friends exhibits to the space, and the Prince Estate – is happy to help. And not just with the motorcycle pics.
They invite you to dig, if you will, the picture, of yourself reenacting the ‘When Doves Cry’ video, among nine other interactive experiences. The scene is perfectly set with lilacs strewn on the floor and a steaming bathtub — but don’t disrobe and jump in. Later, you can grab a few shots in a room dedicated to the Diamonds and Pearls era, filled with torches, candelabras and, of course, diamonds and pearls, before setting off to a DJed Prince dance party in an audiovisual space inspired by Prince’s Glam Slam and designed by his lighting and production manager, Roy Bennett. You can also take a digital personality quiz to get your personalized Prince playlist.”
–Matthew]
[Image: A room recreates the “When Doves Cry” music video scene at Prince: The Immersive Experience on June 7, 2022. Source: “’Prince: The Immersive Experience’ Brings Icon’s Music and Life to the Magnificent Mile.” Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago]
What all these Netflix-inspired immersive experiences mean for S.F. theater
Practically overnight, immersive theater in the Bay Area has a major new player in Netflix.
By Lily Janiak
July 6, 2022
Practically overnight, immersive theater in the Bay Area has a major new player in Netflix.
With the June launch of “Stranger Things: The Experience” and this week’s opening of “The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience,” the streaming giant has built two walk-through worlds in San Francisco, each inspired by a hit TV series.
These two pieces, together employing more than 150 locals (including many actors), are part of a global undertaking. In 2019, Netflix hired its first head of experiences in Greg Lombardo, who now leads an in-house team of 10. This year, the company expects its many in-person experiences — which also include “Stranger Things” retail pop-up shops, a multiplayer virtual reality experience based on “Army of the Dead” and a heist experience born of “Money Heist” — to reach 3 million visitors in cities around the world.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the Netflix “experiences” in San Francisco qualify as theater, but the two forms share a preponderance of qualities: costumes, sets, props, lighting and performers playing parts. Audiences and artists must meet in the same space at an appointed time, and audiences are meant to go on a journey and feel something over a defined period of time.
Lombardo, in an interview with The Chronicle, said with a laugh that his parents are the only people to whom he has to explain what “an experience” is. “People understand what experiences are more and more,” he said.
That’s due largely to years of work by professional theater artists — everyone from Punchdrunk and Emursive of “Sleep No More” fame to the Bay Area’s own Joshua Grannell, a.k.a. Peaches Christ, who mounts a haunted attraction in the Old Mint each year for Halloween, and Steve M. Boyle, whose Epic Immersive has been devising boutique and corporate immersive experiences since 2015.
“I feel like for the last 30 years, I’ve always been part of things that end up later becoming popular by corporations,” Grannell told The Chronicle, citing his drag work as Peaches Christ as another example.
Conventional explanations for the increasing popularity of immersive theater include the isolation wrought by the digital world and, more recently, the pandemic.
“People want to be touched. They want to be grabbed,” Grannell said.
He means that literally. His Halloween audiences at at the Old Mint have the option of buying red necklaces to wear, which signals to performers their consent to be touched. “My thought when we started that was we’ll get a handful of people that want to get grabbed or locked in a closet or be force-fed stuff,” he said. In fact, “way more people buy them than don’t.”
“Twenty, 30 years ago, especially in theater world, it was, ‘You do not touch the actors. The actors do not touch you,’ and that is completely flipped on its head,” he added.
For Boyle, who has designed immersive worlds for Apple, Google, Facebook and others, the level of involvement immersive theater asks of audiences, coupled with the rich worlds constructed around them, means stunning transformations are possible. His tech engineer audiences, who aren’t typical theater audiences, crave those transformations. “People get really, truly vulnerable in ways that, unless you’re going to therapy every week, most people don’t get to do,” he said.
If Netflix’s fans want more out of their shows than just binge-watching and talking about them online — and if they’re willing to spend night-on-the-town prices to make that happen — still other explanations might apply.
TV’s current key demographic, often defined as mine (18- to 49-year-olds), grew up with Disneyland (which opened in 1955), Universal Studios (1964) Disney World (1971) and McDonald’s PlayPlaces (1971) as permanent fixtures in our childhood imaginations. We acclimated early to the idea that a kid’s highest aspiration was a corporate artistic creation you could walk around inside.
But if many Disney creations target kids, they also tap older markets. “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser,” a two-night immersive experience for all ages at Disney World, suggests the kind of money to be made, with “starting” packages ranging from $4,809 to $5,999 per cabin.
Still another explanation might be the rise of niche TV and the decline of TV monoculture.
With the possible exception of a few blockbusters such as “Game of Thrones,” TV audiences have to work harder to find fellow fans. Earlier this year, Variety reported that the number of TV shows (except in the pandemic during 2020) has increased each year since 2008. In a 2021 report, Nielsen referred to the “fragmenting” of TV audiences, in terms of both form (how they watch) and content. No longer can you make a reference at the in-person or virtual office water cooler about your favorite show and assume most will get it, as you could in the heydays of “Friends,” “Seinfeld” or “The Simpsons.” (There is an immersive “Friends” experience, by the way, and it’s also supposed to come to San Francisco in 2022, though specific dates have not yet been announced.)
Although I found “Stranger Things: The Experience” pretty terrible, as I wrote in my review, it did afford one small compensation: the too-rare feeling of looking around and knowing that everyone in the room shared something, that you could mention a character name or a plot point without having to explain it.
“We as an industry have known for a while now that we’re poised to explode,” Boyle said. “That explosion was never going to happen without bringing in big players.”
On the positive side, corporate dollars from Disney, Netflix and others such as Fever (which produces the “Friends” experience and also partners with Netflix on its immersive experiences) can help normalize this work and make it easier to explain. “The danger here is that we come to see immersive art and immersive theater as just marketing activations for (intellectual property) and other media. That’s where what’s the intention of the piece comes into play,” he said.
Ideally, he said, “All of it can coexist.”
Boyle has his own theory about the rise of immersive theater, a kind of corollary to the role played by isolation in the digital world.
With social media, he said, we’ve come to see ourselves as “main characters” in a different way. “Immersive theater is a place where you can be the main character. You matter to the story, and it matters that you’re there and physically present and live.”
Leave a Reply