段英梅 · Yingmei Duan

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Madness; from first proof to final copy

时间: approx. 3 hours

Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester, UK, 2009

Live performance with Carol Batton

Now I can speak same Yingmei Duan. This means I no need to speak Yiddish, just Yingmeish.

With a word knowledge of 15,000 words, I was never understood, but now I talk yingmeish.

I am no longer considered mad, except we talked about my madness together in the Chinese Arts Centre,

on 24th October 2009.

Yingmei Duan said it was ‘Performance’, and it was a ‘right performance’.

And now everyone knows …………………..I’m SANE!!!!!

We are both happy, and

Yingmei keeps saving me, frequently, because I mad.

She saves me to C-drive.

I will keep speaking Yingmeish so I can be understood.

Carol Batton 27th October 2009

Carol Batton was discovered as a poet-performer, in Manchester, ( by Yingmei Duan in 2009), 58 years after Carol’s mother discovered Carol, and up to twenty years after everyone else, and maybe six years until the Germans will find out?

“Naturally”, Carol Batton was taught,

Deliberately… without, “Acting”,

And then for the first time Carol stopped Acting,

and this natural performance,

led by Arts Education Research Practitioner, Yingmei Duan,

was realistic, real-life and real time.

Meditation,(including Ti-Chi), Autumn Visualization with the Winter Tree poem.

semi-prepared conversation, the hiding of written wishes, Chinese improvised singing, dancing,

live poetry, music, audience recipients of personally designed poems…

Everyone joined in.

Even the Artworks in the Chinese Arts Centre, had planned involvement.

Was it ‘Performance’ or ‘Workshop’ or ‘Therapy’?

All to explain that psychiatry, itself, is the madness, which, hurts the harmed.

And allow the voice, of Carol Batton, to explain how the ‘Mad’ are destroyed further,

after life experience has often harmed them previously.

And Art is the true sanity.

Yingmei Duan was given a ruler and tasked with ‘Measuring the sky’, and off she went to measure it, with a ruler and a poem in support, in the background. At the end of the poem, she still had not measured it , and the sky remains unmeasured to this day?...

Two CD tracks were played involving Carol Batton’s words.

Three different poems, on card, were available to take away…

The hidden wishes were never found...

The audience became saner…

The psychiatric system remains bad…

The British clocks went back by one hour and it went darker…

Carol Batton, who is not used to performance, slept for two days…

Yingmei Duan, who is not used to clocks changing time for Winter,

Yingmei Duan, who is not used to clocks changing time for Winter, Woke up, and became busier, as the residency reached to the final, (Third), month.