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I photographed the Sakpata dance which is performed for the god of smallpox. These dancers wore heavy cowrie shell necklaces and colorful short green and red skirts. These were the only female dancers we saw and the only dancers whose faces were uncovered. The mask societies are the exclusive province of males. These men and women leapt acrobatically, performing cartwheels in the dirt and shimmied low to the ground, writhing to the beat. The dance supposedly serves to keep the smallpox illness away from the village. For this photograph I moved in close using a 20-35mm Zoom-Nikkor lens to get some background of the village and used a fairly slow shutter speed of my N90s around 1/60th of a second to capture a little movement in the dancers.
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