Nonstop movement at the Door Kinetic Arts Festival
Alan Kopischke:
Here we are on Lake Michigan, in the woods. All these acres of gorgeous property, nature. It’s an ideal location for artists to find inspiration.
Eric Simonson:
We’ve got this beautiful place, and it’s conducive to creativity. It elicits inspiration.
Angela Fitzgerald:
It’s called Björklunden, also known as the Door County campus of Appleton’s Lawrence University. It’s usually a sedate retreat center hosting weekend seminars. But for one week each year, it’s home to an energetic celebration of the arts, ironically named DKAF.
Eric Simonson:
DKAF, what we call it, is the Door Kinetic Arts Festival.
Angela Fitzgerald:
Kinetic means movement, and DKAF is nonstop.
Meghann Wilkinson:
For those of us who are in the field of art that is kinetic in some way, it’s just an extremely inspiring and enriching time.
Eric Simonson:
It’s not just an arts festival. It’s a kinetic arts festival. What’s that mean? Kinetic art is, it’s moving in space, but mostly, it’s moving here. It’s moving intellectually, it’s moving emotionally, and it’s moving because it’s in process.
Angela Fitzgerald:
At DKAF, the process becomes the product, as audiences show up to view works in progress.
Host:
Unbelievable amount of artists and dancers…
Speaker 1:
We have big dreams. We’re in the act of creating something new.
Angela Fitzgerald:
A big part of the process is bringing artists together to learn from each other.
Alan Kopischke:
We try to bring in artists from lots of different disciplines so that they can bounce off of each other while they’re all in the midst of their creative process.
Okorie Johnson:
Petri dish of collaboration. It’s just a wonderful opportunity where all these different things are being thrown in and germinating and making things together, so I love it.
Angela Fitzgerald:
It’s a vision born from festival founder Eric Simonson’s own artistic journey.
Eric Simonson:
Jumping from one medium to another, it elicits inspiration.
Angela Fitzgerald:
As an Oscar-winning documentarian, Emmy nominee, Broadway playwright, actor, theater and opera director, Eric has had a remarkably successful and varied career.
Alan Kopischke:
Eric has done so many things. He’s just had a marvelous career. DKAF is his legacy.
Angela Fitzgerald:
Eric turned to his brother-in-law, UW-Green Bay theater professor Alan Kopischke, to help make the Door County festival a reality. They have strong family connections to the peninsula.
Eric Simonson:
It’s a beautiful place, Door County. It’s got everything. We would come up here from the time I can remember. So, when I got older, that tradition continued, and I became a writer and a director, and I found it very conducive to creation.
Speaker 2:
And I create a kind of sonic experience that is specific to those of us here in the room.
Eric Simonson:
I’ve always wanted the festival to be attractive to just anybody who wanted to come. Anybody who’s interested in being moved, if that is their passion, we are the answer to their question. So, there’s a certain spirit.
Angela Fitzgerald:
It’s a spirit Eric hopes will propel DKAF into the future.
Eric Simonson:
We have grand visions. I think it’s important that art serves a purpose, and that purpose is to find what is common in all of us. If we sit in an audience and look at one another and recognize that, that’s what our aim is here.
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