Nonstop movement at the Door Kinetic Arts Festival
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Open, inclusive collaboration takes center stage at this Door County arts festival.
Once a year, quiet Door County academic retreat Björklunden transforms into a creative laboratory during the Door Kinetic Arts Festival. Founded by Eric Simonson, an award-winning documentarian and playwright, the festival invites artists to collaborate across disciplines and share works in progress in an inspiring celebration of art in motion.
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Wisconsin Life is a local public television program presented by PBS Wisconsin
Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided by the Wooden Nickel Fund, Mary and Lowell Peterson, A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family, Leon Price & Lily Postel, Stanley J. Cottrill Fund, UW...
Nonstop movement at the Door Kinetic Arts Festival
Clip | 4m 14sVideo has Closed Captions
Once a year, quiet Door County academic retreat Björklunden transforms into a creative laboratory during the Door Kinetic Arts Festival. Founded by Eric Simonson, an award-winning documentarian and playwright, the festival invites artists to collaborate across disciplines and share works in progress in an inspiring celebration of art in motion.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship[gentle music] - 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.
♪ But she chose me ♪ [cheering] 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.
- DKAF, what we call it, is the Door Kinetic Arts Festival.
- Angela: 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: 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: At DKAF, the process becomes the product, as audiences show up to view works in progress.
- Host: Unbelievable amount of artists and dancers... - We have big dreams.
We're in the act of creating something new.
- Angela: A big part of the process is bringing artists together to learn from each other.
- Alan: 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: It's a vision born from festival founder Eric Simonson's own artistic journey.
- Jumping from one medium to another, it elicits inspiration.
- Angela: As an Oscar-winning documentarian, Emmy nominee, Broadway playwright, actor, theater, and opera director, Eric has had a remarkably successful and varied career.
- Eric has done so many things.
He's just had a marvelous career.
DKAF is his legacy.
- Angela: 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: 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.
- And I create a kind of sonic experience that is specific to those of us here in the room.
[bright cello music] - Eric: 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: It's a spirit Eric hopes will propel DKAF into the future.
- Eric: 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.
[bright music] [applause] [birds chirping]
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Wisconsin Life is a local public television program presented by PBS Wisconsin
Funding for Wisconsin Life is provided by the Wooden Nickel Fund, Mary and Lowell Peterson, A.C.V. and Mary Elston Family, Leon Price & Lily Postel, Stanley J. Cottrill Fund, UW...