Pat Rix has a BEd and a Diploma of Fine Arts from the University of South Australia, a Diploma of Teaching from the SA CAE and a BA from Adelaide University. Her skills include music, writing, drama, singing, performance and the visual arts and she has worked continuously as a writer and composer in SA and interstate since 1987. Her instrumental music has been featured on national and local radio and her music has been featured on Adelaide Community Music's "South Australian Composers" radio broadcasts 1991/2. She won the SA Health Commission's Safe Sex Song Competition in 1995 with her "Let's Get It On!"
Pat spent many years as a secondary school teacher and still enjoys working with children. She has worked as an artist-in-residence for schools, and in 1993 her time with Marla Area School in remote SA resulted in a production of a children's play, "The Haunted Town". She has worked with Carclew Youth Arts, Unley Youth Theatre and Jumbuck and with students at risk in the Port Adelaide and Christies Beach areas. In the 1980s and early 1990s she and long time creative partner Kate O'Brien travelled, performed and led workshops all around Australia. In the late 1980s their two award-winning plays, "Windows" and "Decibels" were performed in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and extensively toured by the Queensland, NSW and SA Arts Councils, (1988-1991) to rural and remote areas including Aboriginal and Islander communities on Cape York and islands in the Torres Strait. These tours and subsequent residencies fuelled her believe that the health and strength of a community derives from a sense of belonging.
Committed to the idea of singing as a means of helping to empower disabled people, in 1988 Pat and Kate created and carried out a creative programme with aphasic children as Elizabeth Special School. Pat founded the Box Factory Choir and directed it from 1993-1999. In 1997 she co-founded with Anne Thoday, then recreation officer at Minda Inc - a residential institution for people with severe intellectual disabilities - the Holdfast Bay Community Choir. This is a fully integrated community choir for people of all ages, all abilities and all walks of life. Pat is the ongoing Director of the choir, which was a world first, and speaks of it as her passion; "my life". In 1999 she had a six weeks residency as a writer in Vancouver, Canada, and established there a sister choir for the Holdfast Community Choir. She has worked as writer and composer/musical director for Vitalstatistix, Junction, SPLASH, Mainstreet, No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, Doppio Teatro and the State Theatre (for a reading of Lavender's Blue). She has written five radio plays, all produced and broadcast by the ABC and co-written ten stage plays. Since 1994 she has written six plays in her own right, five of which have been professionally produced. She has spoken and run workshops at a number of national and international conferences, including being keynote speaker at the National NICAN conference in Melbourne in 1998. In recent years she has been commissioned to write songs, music and soundscapes for ceremonies, including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1998 Masters' Games.
Summing up her work she says, "Bringing the strengths of mainstream and community writing, theatre and performance together has become my passion and my life's work. I am also committed to helping others create work which nourishes and re-enchants the spirit in an increasingly secular world. I aim to create works which push through barriers of difference, which express the richness of a sizable chunk of the human family in all its diversity and therefore generate audience" (cv). As well as the plays listed below, Pat was the script facilitator for "We Now Walk Tall", produced by the Murray Malley and Southern Fleurieu Health : Mental Health Service, which won a Mental Health Promotion Award.
