The Door Kinetic Arts Festival is a hard festival to fit in a box. Events range from tap dance led by Jumanne Taylor to Pulitzer-winning author readings from the likes of David Maraniss. Cocktail presentations, short films, play-writing, performances and art in various media are also part of the event each fall. Submitted photos.
The Door Kinetic Arts Festival
by ERIC SIMONSON, festival founder
At the final event on the last day of the 2025 Door Kinetic Arts Festival (DKAF), an audience member rushed up to me and said, “I know what this festival reminds me of: college!” I smiled and said, “Yes, I guess that’s the idea.”
I had been presenting the festival for some time – this coming year is our 10th anniversary – and I had become familiar with the euphoric high that comes at the end of a week of creation and audience engagement. I also knew the festival was relatively new to this person.
As creative director of DKAF, I attend all of the events, every day, and last year’s festival was our biggest yet. But I’d noticed something had changed: I started to see people, like the man who approached me, show up night after night, taking in the entirety of the festival along with me.
In years past, it was generally people coming for this performance or that. Now, people were catching as much as they could. This made me happy, because this was exactly how I had hoped the festival would evolve.
Years ago, when I was a struggling actor and director in Chicago, I worked as an usher to see free shows at Steppenwolf, Organic Theater and Wisdom Bridge. Somewhere along the way, still in my salad days b ut after I had made a bit of a name for myself, a couple of Chicago theater legends, Bernie and Jane Sahlins (Bernie co-founded Second City Theater), started an ambitious project called the Chicago International Theater Festival. They raised oodles of money and searched the world over to bring the finest theater to Chicago’s doorstep.
The initial response from the Chicago theater community was to pooh-pooh the effort, suspicious that Chicago theater needed the competition and, at the same time, certain that Chicago artists were already creating world-class work. But Bernie and Jane had nothing but good intentions. Part of their mission was to inspire local artists and open their creative imaginations to what was possible. To accomplish this, they went to local creatives, including myself, and encouraged us to see any and every show we wanted, free of charge.
I took them up on it and saw everything I could during the 10 days of the festival. I took in shows from Japan, Russia, England and Canada, and from across the United States as well. Some Chicago theaters were included in the mix, too.
What resulted, for me at least, was an explosion of creativity. My imagination ran wild with the possibilities of what I could do next with my own work. Seeing these shows made me question some of what I was doing and pushed me to do better.
The Door Kinetic Arts Festival is not the same thing. First of all, we don’t have a seemingly bottomless budget. Our artists are more national than international, and we are interdisciplinary rather than exclusively theater. But there are strong similarities. We offer a comprehensive, immersive experience in arts and entertainment, with an emphasis on entertainment, because we never want to bore or appear above it all. And we program an eclectic mix of work that expands the mind, using variety and intrigue to engage our audience.
So is DKAF “just like college?” I think yes. A college campus, like DKAF, provides a kind of protection from the outside world and asks students to focus on growth and expanding the mind. It’s both fun and inspirational, deeply rooted in community – and in pride of that community.
So I could not have asked for a better compliment.
Last year, DKAF presented theater, dance, magic, cocktails, music, panel discussions, films and radio plays through 27 performances crammed into six days.
When people ask which event they should attend, I tell them pick one, pick two – you won’t be sorry. But if you can make most or all of them, you’re in for a treat you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
DKAF will host its annual gala, open to the public, on Friday, June 5, at 5:30 pm, at the Door County Granary in Sturgeon Bay. The event features live music, plein-air art in action, food, libations from James Beard-nominated mixologist Robert Simonson, raffles, plus live and silent auctions.
For tickets, visit doorkinetic.com
Culture Club is contributed by members of the Peninsula Arts and Humanities Alliance, a coalition of nonprofit organizations whose purpose is to enhance, promote and advocate the arts, humanities and natural sciences in Door County. The member organizations are: Birch Creek Music Performance Center; Björklunden; The Clearing Folk School; Door Community Auditorium; Door Shakespeare; The Hardy Gallery; Midsummer’s Music; Miller Art Museum; Northern Sky Theater; Peninsula Music Festival; Peninsula Players Theatre; Peninsula School of Art; Third Avenue PlayWorks; Trueblood Performing Arts Center; and Write On, Door County.
