This biographical article is written like a résumé .(February 2024) |
Robyn Archer | |
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Birth name | Robyn Smith |
Born | 1948 (age 75–76) Prospect, South Australia |
Occupation(s) | Singer-songwriter, festival director |
Website | RobynArcher.com |
Robyn Archer, AO, CdOAL (born 1948) is an Australian singer, writer, stage director, artistic director, and public advocate of the arts, in Australia and internationally.
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 the University of Adelaide and immediately took up a full-time singing career. Archer has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours English) and Diploma of Education from the University of Adelaide.
Archer is gay. [4]
Robyn Archer has been the subject of several pieces now housed in the Australian National Portrait Gallery, in particular an oil painting by George Gittoes was donated to the collection in 2012. [5]
In 1974 Archer 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.
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 was a commentator at the inaugural broadcast Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras for the ABC, Australia. [6] 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 1 April 2016 Robyn Archer AO was inducted into the South Australian Music Hall of Fame.
Title | Details |
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Take Your Partners for... The Ladies Choice |
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The Wild Girl in the Heart |
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Tonight: Lola Blau |
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A Star is Torn |
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Rough As Guts |
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Robyn Archer Sings Brecht (with The London Sinfonietta & Dominic Muldowney) |
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Robyn Archer Sings Brecht Volume Two (with The London Sinfonietta & Dominic Muldowney) |
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The Pack of Women | |
Mrs. Bottle's (Absolutely Blurtingly Beautiful World-Beating) Burp |
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Ancient Warriors |
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Keep Up Your Standards! (with Paul Grabowsky) |
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Classic Cabaret Rarities |
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Eating on the Plane (ABC for Kids film clip, 1990) (appeared on ABC for Kids: Video Hits from 1991) (Director: Tony Wellington; Producer: Vicki Watson)
The ARIA Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises excellence, innovation, and achievement across all genres of Australian music. They commenced in 1987.
Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result | Ref. |
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1987 | The Pack of Women | Best Original Soundtrack, Cast or Show Album | Won | [13] |
1991 | Mrs Bottle's Burp | Best Children's Album | Won |
The Helpmann Awards is an awards show, celebrating live entertainment and performing arts in Australia, presented by industry group Live Performance Australia (LPA) since 2001. [14] In 2019, Archer received the JC Williamson Award, the LPA's highest honour, for their life's work in live performance. [15]
Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result |
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2013 | Robyn Archer in Concert: Que Reste-t-il? | Best Cabaret Performer | Won |
2018 | Robyn Archer | JC Williamson Award | awarded |
Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result |
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1980 [16] | Robyn Archer | Henry Lawson Award | awarded |
The South Australian Music Hall of Fame celebrates the careers of successful music industry personalities and creates relationships with the upcoming youth and future of South Australian Music.
Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result |
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2016 [17] | Robyn Archer | Hall of Fame | awarded |
The Victorian Honour Roll of Women was established in 2001 to recognise the achievements of women from the Australian state of Victoria.
Year | Nominee / work | Award | Result |
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2001 | Robyn Archer | Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award | awarded |
The National Portrait Gallery, also known as the National Portrait Gallery of Australia in Canberra is a public art gallery containing portraits of prominent Australians. It was established in 1998 and moved to its present building on King Edward Terrace in December 2008.
Wendy Sharpe is an Australian artist who lives and works in Sydney and Paris. She has held over 70 solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, been awarded many national awards and artist residencies for her work, and was an official Australian War Artist to East Timor in 1999–2000.
Elizabeth Ann Dewar Churcher was an Australian arts administrator, best known as director of the National Gallery of Australia from 1990 to 1997. She was also a painter in her own right earlier in her life.
Judy Cassab, born Judit Kaszab, was an Australian painter.
Melbourne International Arts Festival, formerly Spoleto Festival Melbourne – Festival of the Three Worlds, then Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, becoming commonly known as Melbourne Festival, was a major international arts festival held in Melbourne, Australia, from 1986 to 2019. It was to be superseded by a new festival called Rising from 2020.
Meryl Tankard is an Australian dancer and choreographer who has a wide national and international reputation.
Robyn Anne Nevin is an Australian actress, director, and stage producer, recognised with the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards and the JC Williamson Award at the Helpmann Awards for her outstanding contributions to Australian theatre performance art. Former head of both the Queensland Theatre Company and the Sydney Theatre Company, she has directed more than 30 productions and acted in more than 80 plays, collaborating with internationally renowned artists, including Richard Wherrett, Simon Phillips, Geoffrey Rush, Julie Andrews, Aubrey Mellor, Jennifer Flowers, Cate Blanchett and Lee Lewis.
Virginia Gay is an Australian actress, writer, and director, mostly known for her work on the Australian TV dramas Winners & Losers and All Saints.
Anna Louise Goldsworthy is an Australian classical pianist, writer, academic, playwright, and librettist, known for her 2009 memoir Piano Lessons. She has held several academic positions, and as of 2023 is director of the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide. She is a founder member of the Seraphim Trio, which has toured Australia and the world since 1995.
Paul Atherstone Grabowsky, born 27 September 1958, is an Australian pianist and composer, founder of the Australian Art Orchestra.
Carol Jerrems was an Australian photographer/filmmaker whose work emerged just as her medium was beginning to regain the acceptance as an art form that it had in the Pictorial era, and in which she newly synthesizes complicity performed, documentary and autobiographical image-making of the human subject, as exemplified in her Vale Street.
Jan Cornall is an Australian singer, comedian and writer. Known for her contributions to queer music through the group Baba Yaga during the 1970s and the hit musical Failing in Love Again (1979), Jan Cornall was a leader in the women's comedy and cabaret resurgence of the early 1980s. She has contributed to Australian community theatre, addressing issues facing regional and rural women, and had a long involvement in forging cross cultural links with Indonesian and Australian writers and artists.
Elizabeth Cameron Dalman is an Australian choreographer, teacher, and performer. She founded Australian Dance Theatre and was its artistic director from 1965 to 1975. She is also the founding director of Mirramu Dance Company.
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The Skywhale is a hot air balloon resembling a strange whale-like creature designed by the sculptor Patricia Piccinini as part of a commission to mark the centenary of the city of Canberra. It was built by Cameron Balloons in Bristol, United Kingdom, and first flew in Australia in 2013. The balloon's design received a mixed response after it was publicly unveiled in May 2013. It has since been displayed around the world, and was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2019.
The Pack of Woman was a cabaret devised by Australian performer and director Robyn Archer, first performed in London in 1981. Although funny and entertaining, the work also set out to shock audiences into examining the role of women in Western society. The title is a metaphor for the game of life played according to rules in which sexual politics were critical. In 1983, it was produced by Understudies, directed by Archer and designed by Roger Kirk. It played seasons in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra with a cast consisting of Jane Clifton, Judi Connelli and Michele Fawdon.
Brett Joseph Sheehy an Australian artistic director, producer and curator. He has been director of international arts festivals in Australia's state capital cities, Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival, and Melbourne Festival.
Pat Brassington is an Australian contemporary artist working in the field of digital art, and photography. Born in Hobart, Tasmania, she was named Australia's key surrealist working in photomedia.
Shortis and Simpson are an Australian entertainment and political satire duo composed of John Damien Shortis and Moya Simpson. They are singers, composers, political satirists and cabaret artists as well as producers and writers of wide-ranging performance genres. John Shortis is a satirist, singer, songwriter, composer, social historian, and political commentator. Moya Simpson is a singer and actor, and choir director. She immigrated to Australia in 1978. Their work includes, Under the influence which was a music theatre production in 2023.
Chris Drummond is an Australian theatre director. He was artistic director of Brink Productions (2004-2023). and Associate Director with the State Theatre Company of South Australia (2001-2004).
Robyn Smith (now Archer)