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The Radio Art Hour: Yvette Janine Jackson, Diana Chang (Audio)

Oct 30, 2021
Produced by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellows and Artistic Director Tom Roe.
Yvette Janine Jackson's 2021 work "Test Flight No. 1" and Diana Chang's "Falling Free" from Jan. 1, 1989 are featured. Jackson brings attention to historical events and social issues through her radio operas. Jackson's work is inspired by early 20th-century radio plays and theatrical sound design. She writes, "Test Flight No. 1 is an etude for a series of compositions themed around commercial space tourism." In Chang's work, a curious repeat of the history of Asian immigrants, she focuses on an elderly Chinese-American woman left behind in an American suburb by a husband who wishes to return to his native China. More Americanized than he, her solitude proves a liberation. Told as a monologue with flash-backs to scenes from her earlier life, Falling Free is a delicate, poetic rendering of ambiguities: the ambiguity of the Chinese-American experience, and of human desire. An adaptation of a short story by the same name. Commissioned by New American Radio. Finally, we end things with Gregory Whitehead's brief "Adioradio."