Mareshia and her friends bucked 40 years of local customs this month by organizing their own integrated prom, a formal dance open to Wilcox County's white, black, Latino and Asian high school students.

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The result has the elegance of a formal dance - a kind of minuet, in which the participants advance and retreat according to well-understood rules, until they have arrived at a satisfactory outcome.

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Dance also plays a central role in formal ceremonies such as "Iyomante, " in which participants send the deity embodied in a bear they have eaten back to heaven by mimicking the movements of a living bear.

UNESCO: Culture