Job Plan Workshop, Enterprise Training. ‘Restart’, etc. Would those who run these Government-funded initiatives do them if their reward was to be ‘single and living on baked beans in a low rent bedsit’?

The short answer is probably ‘no’. Yet these courses are deemed by the majority who attend them as ‘largely useless, poorly run and a sad waste of time’. For someone like Julian Maynard Smith of Station House Opera to produce exciting, experimental and ‘spiritually challenging work’, he has to live in ‘baked bean’ conditions.

Such is the state of Performance Art. A short while back, the Arts Council showed understanding with their ‘Collaborations’ fund, but had some trouble defining exactly what such work collaborations were. Now, about to undergo a new name and identity, it seems that the Arts Council has some problems defining itself...

Perhaps ‘going with the flow’ is the answer – on page 13 John Keefe introduces us to ‘Information Technology’ – welcome to the 90s! In the meantime, the diversity of countries and places where physical theatre has the capacity to be performed never ceases to amaze – Optik present a report of their work on page 14 which they performed in an Egyptian swimming pool!

MAG, ever enthused by new challenges, will be hosting a Workshop Symposium in Manchester in September – an exciting prospect as it will encompass looking at the development of mime in the UK and Europe.

And on that note, perhaps mime should be, as one spectator to Optik put it, ‘[a] simulation of life... dissolving and settling somewhere else, always changing, never still’.