MAKING UP - ELEVEN SCENES FROM A BANGKOK HOTEL

BACKGROUND This interdisciplinary creative work moves at the intersection of contemporary essay practice and creative radio feature production. The contemporary essay has seen a wave of innovation in exploring, for example, lyric (D'Agata), queer (Nelson) and multimodal (Bresland) forms, amid debates on genre boundaries, ethics and transgression. Radio Features have entered a new 'golden age' (Biewan) where collisions between distinct geographical styles and approaches to audio soundwork (Hilmes) have emerged within renewed global interest in the form. CONTRIBUTION Eleven Scenes from a Bangkok Hotel is a radiophonic essay/feature about sexual and textual identity and the act of 'making up'. Set in an international city at the crossroads of many flight-paths, the work interweaves an essay dramatising the mindscape of a Western 'author', with documentary-style representations of young Asian voices from the transgender community. The soundpiece is an adaptation of David Carlin's text essay of the same name. The production traces what happens to words when they become audible and ownership is shared. The final audio work builds on this theme to explore the complex relationship between narrative voice and authorship. SIGNIFICANCE Eleven Scenes was commissioned by ABC RN's Creative Audio Unit, Australia's leading broadcast space for audio art. The feature premiered on ABC RN's Soundproof program to a national audience in December 2015. It has been described by leading US documentary-maker and scholar Michael Rabiger as 'a superb piece of work, the kind of spiralling, multi-layered consciousness one hopes to light upon, and that is so enjoyably challenging compared with 99% of radio.'