Listening to Gregg Goldston and C Nicholas Johnson talk about the image problem that plagues their art form you would be forgiven for thinking they worked in the murky world of 'glamour' photography.
But think not of busty women in silk stockings and suspenders and instead of the common trappings that are the image of their craft - white face, white gloves, blue striped shirt, black pants and black upturned hat - and you realise we are discussing the far less risque world of mime. So why is there an image problem? 'Everyone thinks mime is the act on the street corner,' says Johnson, who is part of a five-man company from the United States, the Invisible People Mime Theatre, performing at the International Arts Carnival. 'Modern mime is a very new art form. People haven't seen enough to know there is great mime and when they see it in the streets, they think that's what it is.
'Most of those acts are buskers or students trying to learn mime. It goes a lot further than that.' The mention of mime conjures up the image of its most famous living artist, Marcel Marceau, who, aged 73, has been artistic advisor to the Ohio-based company for four years.
'Marcel made mime so popular. In some ways the art was stifled because he made it look so easy everyone did it but no one trained hard at it. Everyone thought it was a solo art and audiences got tired of it because it was so over-exposed,' says Goldston.
Now, a resurgence of mime has taken it beyond the level reached at its most popular in the 1970s.
While Marceau has been mime's greatest exponent in the late 20th century, it was his mentor, Frenchman Etienne Decroux, 'the father of modern mime', who developed the concept of the invisible world and the stylised art of gesture.