Emma Balázs
- ecbalazs
- Sep 1
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 3
Prince was my secret soul friend all my life. From the moment I first encountered his music when I was 12, my soul lit up in his presence. I was a young artist stranded in a country town in Australia, and Prince represented the full possibility of life as a romantic, creative spirit.
Over the years I wasn't an ardent fan, but I always felt strangely close somehow, and every year or so I would check in to see how he was doing.
When Prince died, my heart cracked open. His death utterly changed my life.
In New York City, Purple Rain started playing two days after he died. I sat in screening after screening in the following weeks, for it was as close as I could get to his presence. It was a safe, dark, glowing space for inexplicably deep grieving. In that space, as I grieved for him and grappled with the reality of death and its meaning, Prince forced me to assess how I had lived all the years since I first encountered him. I had to account to myself as a deeply inspired 14 year old who saw this film in 1984, who now seemed to be sitting beside me in the cinema asking me what I had done with my life.
But it wasn't enough to sit in the cinema. I borrowed our school's dance studio after hours and danced it out, week after week, processing, listening, moving, dancing out my life and living in the mystery of this artist’s strong presence. This still wasn't enough.
I realized I was going to need to do something more to honor Prince and his impact on my life, as surely I wasn't alone in this. All kinds of weird and cosmic things were happening at this time that would sound crazy to describe.
From the day Prince died, I followed every tribute posting and every news article. Searching, refreshing, daily, obsessively. I plunged into deep research into Prince’s music and his life story, catching up on all the music I missed, all the life information I could gather.
Everything mattered, nothing was irrelevant, I needed everything I could read, find, listen to that might help me understand what was going on. What happened to Prince? What happened to me?
After wrestling with it for a few months, I finally followed Prince’s call to visit Minneapolis. There I met so many people who shared their personal Prince stories with me, and I felt welcomed into a place that was full of love and respect for this extraordinary artist, who was also a man from Minnesota, who lived there most of his life, and had always returned.
I researched deeply and made my own personal pilgrimage to every home and site I could find associated with Prince. Around that time, knowing I needed to do more,that this was only the beginning, I refocussed my PhD to Prince so I could dedicate myself entirely to this project. As I carefully studied the wild scenes around his emerging legacy, the ongoing public mourning and battles of his estate, as I witnessed the messy birth pangs of Paisley Park as museum, I realized my best contribution would be through art. As a curator, I could create a space for people to pay tribute to Prince's personal, transformational impact on their lives. I knew by then I was not the only one whose life had been deeply touched and changed forever by this artist.
After months of skipping between New York and Minneapolis, I quit my teaching job and moved to Minneapolis. A couple of weeks later, on the first anniversary of Prince’s death, spinning on the dance floor at First Ave, in the intense blur of tribute events, and after almost a lifetime of being single, I fell deeply in love.
To mark the 10th anniversary of Prince's passing, I made a short film about my personal
story, to screen at the museum in 2026. Ƭ̵̬̊
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