Robyn Archer

Robyn Archer
Background information
Birth name Robyn Smith
Born

1948 (age 67–68)


Prospect

Occupation(s) Singer-songwriter, festival director
Website robynarcher.com

Robyn Archer, AO, CdOAL (born 1948) is an Australian singer, writer, stage and director, artistic director, and public advocate of the arts, in Australia and internationally.

Life

Archer was born Robyn Smith[1][2][3] in Prospect, South Australia. She began singing at the age of four years and singing professionally from the age of 12 years, everything from folk and pop and graduating to blues, rock, jazz and cabaret. She graduated from Adelaide University and immediately took up a full-time singing career. Archer has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours English) and Diploma of Education from Adelaide University.

Archer is openly gay.[4]

Performance

In 1974 she sang Annie I in the Australian premiere of Brecht/Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins to open The Space of the Adelaide Festival Centre. She subsequently played Jenny in Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera for New Opera South Australia where she met English translator and editor John Willett. Since then her name has been linked particularly with the German cabaret songs of Weill, Eisler, and Paul Dessau and others from the Weimar Republic, a repertoire which Willett guided her to.

Her one-woman cabaret A Star is Torn (1979) covering various female singers including Billie Holiday and her 1981 show The Pack of Women both became successful books and recordings, the latter also being produced for television in 1986. She played A Star is Torn throughout Australia from 1979 to 1983, and for a year at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End.

Archer has continued to sing a wide-ranging repertoire and in 2008/2009 gave a series of concerts including iprotest! (with Paul Grabowsky) and separate German and French concerts with Michael Morley. All were sell-outs and critically acclaimed.

Robyn has written and devised many works for the stage from The Conquest of Carmen Miranda to Songs From Sideshow Alley and Cafe Fledermaus (directed by Barrie Kosky to open the Merlyn Theatre at the Malthouse in Melbourne). In 1989 she was commissioned to write a new opera, Mambo, for the Nexus Opera, London. In 2008 her play Architektin premiered in Adelaide and in 2009 she devised the Tough Nut Cabaret for a production in Pittsburgh, USA.

Festival director and public speaker

Robyn Archer is also a director of arts festivals in Australia and overseas. Her career took this turn accidentally, with an invitation while she was performing her show Le Chat Noir in Canberra to direct the National Festival of Australian Theatre which was hosted by the national capital. She directed the 1993, 1994 and 1995 editions and this began a string of Artistic Director positions at the Adelaide Festival of Arts (1998 and 2000), the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2002–2004). She created Ten Days on the Island, an international arts festival for Tasmania, spent two years as Artistic Director of the European Capital of Culture, and advised on the start-up of Luminato in Toronto. In 2007 she created The Light in Winter for Federation Square in Melbourne and in July 2009 was appointed Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra 2013.

She is in frequent demand as a speaker and public advocate of the arts all over the world, and her Wal Cherry and Manning Clark Memorial Lectures in 2008/2009 have increased that status. She a was commentator at the inaugural broadcast Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the ABC, Australia.[5] She has been a television guest on The Michael Parkinson Show, Clive James at Home, Good News Week (ABC); Adelaide Festival 1998 (ABC National three-part series), the David Frost New Year Special, The Midday Show, Tonight Live, Review, Dateline, Denton, and Express.

On April 1, 2016 Robyn Archer AO was inducted into the South Australian Music Hall Of Fame.

Discography

Solo albums

Other

Works

Stage works as writer, composer or devisor

Other published works

Positions

Current positions held

Former positions held

Honours and awards

Honours

Arts awards

References

  1. ↑ "AusStage". AusStage. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  2. ↑ "Robyn Archer online : The depArcher lounge : Selected works". Robyn Archer. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  3. ↑ "University Library | Adelaide University Footlights Club Papers 1930-2005". University of Adelaide. Retrieved 7 November 2012. Robyn Smith (now Archer)
  4. ↑ Matthews, Jill Julius (1997). Sex in public: Australian sexual cultures. Allen & Unwin. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-86448-049-8.
  5. ↑ "Robyn Archer online : The depArcher lounge : Bio/CV". Robyn Archer.
  6. ↑ Creative Director announced for Centenary Media Release, Jon Stanhope, Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory
  7. ↑ Arts Law: Patrons
  8. ↑ Official website – Biography
  9. ↑ "Armfield off to SA". The Canberra Times. 55, (16,555). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 23 January 1981. p. 9. Retrieved 15 June 2016 – via National Library of Australia.
  10. ↑ "TEN SCOOPS THE POOL". The Australian Women's Weekly. 48, (4). Australia, Australia. 25 June 1980. p. 19 (Your TV Magazine). Retrieved 15 June 2016 – via National Library of Australia.
  11. ↑ "IN BRIEF CAPO nears $500,000". The Canberra Times. 65, (20,272). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 12 October 1990. p. 5. Retrieved 15 June 2016 – via National Library of Australia.

External links

Preceded by
Barrie Kosky		 Director of the Adelaide Festival of Arts
1998–2000 		Succeeded by
Peter Sellars
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