|
It's hard to single out particular performances. Young Robyn Smith managed to glimpse the dying years of Australian vaudeville through her father and her first mentor, song and dance man Keith Petersen. She approached nightclub work from that angle and when she first encountered 'art' it was that of Berlin and the 30s.
She embraced the tradition of European Cabaret in the works of Brecht/Weill and Eisler and then went on to devise and write many original works in the political cabaret mould - Kold Komfort Kaffee, The Pack of Women, Scandals, Cut and Thrust, See Ya Next Century - and innumerable concert and cabaret performances which juxtaposed existing with original material, the comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Robyn Archer has said that in her role as a curator of major festivals, she feels 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.
 |
|
Robyn singing a song by Brecht and Eisler, from Solidarity Song, a biopic about the life of Hanns Eisler by Rhombus Media. Directed by Larry Weinstein.
|
view video
Requires Quicktime
|
|
|
|
|
"The Australian singer Robyn Archer has been performing songs by Brecht, Weill and Hanns Eisler at the Cottesloe, and revealing in the process that her effortless flexibility and sureness of touch also extends into cabaret, opera, jazz, blues and country music. Possessed of a rich, reverberating contralto full of unexpected twists of phrasing, and an actress's sense of dynamics, she restores to the repertoire the optimism and muscle it deserves"
The Guardian
|
See Ya Next Century
Photo by Robert McFarlane
|
|
|
"Inimitable and indomitable, after more than twenty years in cabaret, Robyn Archer - with fright-red hair and spangled frock, like some madame in a Brothel who has seen it all - belts out songs of deceit, decay and despair"
The Bulletin
|
|
