Try one day without the arts
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With Robyn Archer AO
Monday 18 March 2013
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Podcast available HERE (mp3 format 33MB)
Robyn Archer AO is an Ambassador for the Adelaide Crows, AFL and tennis spectator tragic, Chair of the Arts Advisory Board of the Adelaide College of the Arts and Patron of the Experimental Art Foundation also in Adelaide, Robyn Archer is one of those people for whom culture definitely includes footy as well as Fauré and film. Her role as Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra has also renewed her respect for the creativity in science, planning, big ideas and all those other aspects of any society, but she still sees the arts as both central and at the same time fatally neglected in so many contexts in so many places. Her argument is that if it is impossible to go even one day without encountering the products of art , then artists are as essential as plumbers, doctors and teachers. Hear the 2012 recipient of the Premier's Lifetime Achievement Award make her case for the inclusion of the arts in every aspect of planning for a lively twenty-first century city.
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Co-presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre and the Australia Day Council of South Australia
Biography
Robyn Archer AO is a singer, writer, artistic director and public advocate of the arts. She is currently Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra (2013), and Artistic Director of The Light in Winter (which she created for Federation Square, Melbourne and which won the best Community Event Award in the Australian Event Awards 2012). She is Deputy Chair of the Australia Council (the Australian Government's arts advisory and arts grants organization) and is also advising on the Centenary of ANZAC. Robyn is still singing and recent concerts included Augsburg (birthplace of Bertolt Brecht in whose work she specialises), Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Canberra and Sydney. In 2013 she will give concerts in Canberra during its Centenary year, and around Australia.
A selection of her public speeches is published under the title Detritus (UWA Press) and in 2012 she gave a nationally broadcast National Press Club address Taking the Name of the Capital in Vain, the Memorial Arthur Boyd Lecture in London launched the Centenary of Canberra in Washington and Chicago, and gave the Currency Press Arts Breakfast Address in November. In 2013 she conducts public interviews with international artists Heiner Goebbels and Richard Shechner, gives an address at the Hawke Centre in Adelaide and conference keynotes throughout the year.
Robyn is the former artistic director of The National Festival of Australian Theatre, the Adelaide and Melbourne Festivals, and Ten Days on the Island which she created for Tasmania. She mentors and advises a wide range of younger artists, and has taken part in the European Festivals Association's Ateliers in Varna, Singapore, Izmir and most recently Ljubljana.
Robyn Archer is patron of numerous arts organisations across Australia. She has received the International Society for Performing Arts' International Citation of Merit, ABAF's Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Cultural Leadership Award, and in 2012 the SA Premier's Lifetime Achievement Award. She is an Officer of the Order of Australia, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), Officer of the Crown (Belgium) and holds honorary doctorates from Flinders University (SA), and the Universities of Sydney and Canberra.
You can find more details at www.robynarcher.com.au.
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