Face and body paints have been used from the earliest times, and for a variety of reasons - to enhance beauty, increase fear in the beholder or ward off evil spirits. Face painting is closely linked with masks : both create a disguise and a sense of make believe. Our painted faces are part of the Border Morris tradition. There are several explanations regarding the painted face - We prefer to adopt the popular idea that it is to ward off the evil spirits of winter, and disguise us so that they do not return to haunt us.

Scott Lake plays bass, keyboard and programs the percussion for this collaboration about making the best of a friendship that involves differences of opinion and lifestyle.

Mick Emery is a 'synthophone' player, and uses his prodigious saxophone chops to duplicate just about any wind instrument imaginable. He recently agreed to play a flute track for me, and now it's here for your enjoyment. 'Jalapeno Moment' His site: http://www.mickemery.com

A Mummers Play is an English folk drama based upon the fight between good and evil. One of the protagonists is killed off by the other and is then revived by a magical doctor. Various other characters appear during the course of the play - the amount and variety depending upon the area in which the play originates.

Black Pig perform a version of the old Selston (Nottinghamshire) Bullguysers' play usually at Christmas or in the New Year. We learned it from an old Selston resident who last performed it in his youth.
It is usually performed in pubs local to the Selston area and the play lasts about ten minutes, depending of course on how much beer has been quaffed. PHOTO

We are in the process of rehearsing and fine tuning a new play. This has been written by one of our dancer/musicians Chris Deuchar and it revolves around Captain Pigwash. We are hoping to put this on our new CD and also perform it for the first time this year.
For further in depth information , photo's and scripts on hundreds of folk plays from all over England, visit the Folk Play web site from our related links page.

The Proxima profile has just been updated to "public" - today we're moving Proxima into beta!  For those of you not familiar with Proxima (which would be just about everyone), Proxima is a set of modules (and a custom skin) for Jamroom 5 that adds a set of RESTful API services to your Jamroom site, which in turn can be used to power various clients (such as a mobile app, Javascript HTML5 client, etc.) that need to communicate with a server over a JSON API.

http://www.proximacore.com/page/5/proxima-private-backend-as-a-service

Most of you are familiar with how Jamroom 5 works - i.e. the templates are rendered for a view and then displayed to the user.  With Proxima, things work differently - an authenticated API "request" is sent to the Proxima server, and Proxima in turn sends out a [b]JSON response[/b].  "JSON" is quickly becoming a standard way for mobile clients to communicate with a server backend.

So what can Proxima be used for?  Let's say you have created a mobile app and want to be able to save your users information to the "cloud" where they can log in and out on any mobile device and have their data follow them:

• Use the Proxima User service to create and update "user accounts" for your users
• Use the Proxima Data service to store information in "collections", making it accessible and searchable
• Use the Proxima File service to allow your users to download and use files in your app
• ... and more

With Proxima you can have a client-agnostic "core" that powers multiple views in to your data - all running on your own server, 100% under your control.

And with Proxima being built on Jamroom 5, it is easy and straightforward to create custom Proxima modules that fit right into the Proxima Core.

So if you are a mobile app developer, or are looking for some way to add API services to your Jamroom site, please join us in the Proxima beta and help us craft Proxima to be an awesome backend - we need your input and suggestions!

We hope you enjoy Proxima!