Robyn Archer rises from child singer in Prospect, Adelaide, to a global performer and festivals director
Robyn Archer took her solo A Star is Torn show to London in 1979.
Image by Rohan Thomson from robynarcher.com
From a childhood singer in Prospect, Robyn Archer has become an internationally acclaimed performer and advocate for the arts.
Born Robyn Smith in 1948, she was singing professionally by age 12, moving from folk and pop to blues, rock, jazz and cabaret. After graduating at Adelaide University, she took up singing full-time.
In 1974, Archer she sang Annie I in the Australian premiere of Brecht/Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins to open The Space at Adelaide Festival Centre. She played Jenny in Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera for New Opera South Australia where she met English translator and editor John Willett. Archer has been linked since with German Weimar Republic cabaret songs of Weill, Eisler and Paul Dessau.
Her one-woman cabaret A Star is Torn (1979) covering female singers including Billie Holiday and her 1981 show The Pack of Women became successful books and recordings, the latter also produced for television in 1986. It played throughout Australia 1979-83, and for a year at Wyndham’s Theatre in London's West End.
Archer has singing a wide repertoire and in 2008/2009 gave sellout concerts including iprotest! (with Paul Grabowsky) and German and French concerts with Michael Morley.
Archer has written and devised many works from The Conquest of Carmen Miranda to Songs From Sideshow Alley and Cafe Fledermaus. In 1989, she was commissioned to write the opera, Mambo, for Nexus Opera, London. In 2008, her play Architektin premiered in Adelaide and in 2009 she devised the Tough Nut Cabaret in Pittburgh USA.
Archer also has directed arts festivals in Australia and overseas. This started with an invitation while she was performing her show Le Chat Noir in Canberra to direct the National Festival of Australian Theatre. This began with artistic director positions at the Adelaide Festival (1998, 2000), Melbourne International Arts Theatre (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 starting Luminato in Toronto. In 2007, she created The Light in Winter for Federation Square, Melbourne, and creative director of the Centenary of Canberra 2013.
Archer is in frequent demand as a speaker and public advocate of the arts all over the world. In 2016, Archer was inducted into the South Australian Music Hall of Fame.
