Accomplished Brisbane-based cabaret artist Karen Lee Roberts has been awarded the Access Arts Achievement Award for 2021.

As an international performer, Karen’s credits include the musical HAIR at the Old Vic Theatre in London and her own original works at the Wataboshi Festival in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Performing her original cabaret Chameleon at various festivals around Australia, including Access Arts’ Undercover Artist Festival, she has been gracing Australian festival stages for nearly a decade.

Karen will use the $10,000 grant to produce a new collaborative work Sex and Other Philosophies, in collaboration with performing artists Lucinda Shaw and James Halloran.

Mental wellbeing will be explored, and Karen hopes the audience will come away being enriched by the experience of looking into the souls of characters portrayed in a series of vignettes that are interwoven and entwined by music and text.

“Sex and Other Philosophies is all about deconstructing and interrogating ideas surrounding the concept of what relationships and mindset are all about, and what the values, attitudes and beliefs encompassing them behold.

“The show poses existential questions about life and explores the meaning of the sensual and sensory aspects of life, through poetry, word play, playful dialogue, and original songs,” Karen said.

Karen is aiming to premiere Sex and Other Philosophies in the second half of 2022.

The Access Arts Achievement Award is sponsored by CPL – Choice, Passion, Life, one of Queensland’s leading disability service providers.