Born in Adelaide. Robyn Archer is an Australian Actor, Devisor, Director, Performer, Playwright, Singer, Writer, Associate Director, Producer, Lyricist, Artistic Director, Performance Artist, Author, Composer, Creator, Book and Lyrics, Musical Arranger, Adaptor, Actor and Singer, Speaker, Tenor, Festival Director, who is mentioned in 143 events in the AusStage database
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AusStage
Robyn Archer has established an international reputation as a cabaret artist and as an artistic director. She became the first woman to head a major Australian Arts festival when she was appointed Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival in 1998 and 2000. On 12 June 2000 she became an Officer of the Order of Australia ' for service to the development of cultural life within Australia and its resultant international recognition, through her contribution as an artistic director, performer and writer.'
She is currently the Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra celebrations, which begin in March 2013.
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Inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women
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Australian Women's Register
One of Australia's most successful cabaret performers and influential arts administrators, Robyn Archer began her career as a folk singer while at school. She sang rock and roll and jazz while training as a teacher at the University of Adelaide. After three years as a school teacher, she left to work as a nightclub singer.
Archer embraced the tradition of European cabaret in the works of Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler. In 1974-75 she was acclaimed for her performances in productions of Brecht and Weill's Seven Deadly Sins and The Threepenny Opera in Adelaide. International acclaim for her performances in this repertoire grew with her 1977 appearance in a Brecht programme at the National Theatre, London.
Archer went on to devise and write many original works in the political cabaret mould. Her one-woman cabaret, A Star is Torn premiered in Melbourne in 1979, toured Australia, and ran for a year in London's West End. Her numerous subsequent shows, including Kold Komfort Kaffee , Scandals , Cut and Thrust , See Ya Next Century , and innumerable concert and cabaret performances, juxtaposed existing with original material, the comfortable with the uncomfortable. She was based for the most part in London in the 1980s.- Archer's The Pack of Women traced a remarkable trajectory. It went from a London cabaret starring Archer herself, to an Australian hit with Archer directing, to a book and a television version. The latter was directed by Ted Robinson and starred Jo Kennedy, Meryl Tankard, Judi Connelli, Tracey Harvey with Sandy Evans and Marie Steinway as well as Archer. The programme's soundtrack won an ARIA award in 1987.- In the 1990s, Archer's reputation in arts management grew with her leadership of several Australian arts festivals. She was Artistic Director of the National Festival of Australian Theatre in Canberra for three years. She became the first woman to head a major Australian arts festival with her appointment as artistic director of the Adelaide Festival in 1998 and 2000. She chaired the Australia Council's Community Cultural Development Board, a consultant to the new Melbourne Museum for three years and advisor on the Australian cultural content for EXPO 2000 in Hannover. She created a new celebration of the arts for Tasmania, Ten Days on the Island , the second edition of which was held in March/April 2003. In 2003 she became artistic director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Archer once said that in her role as a curator of major festivals, she felt a direct continuum - that making a festival works on the same principle as making a cabaret - juxtaposition and surprise, the old with the new, the tough with the sweet, the familiar with the unfamiliar - so that the whole is so much greater than the mere sum of the parts.
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