unmeaning burlesque. Each dancer should have a clear mental picture of the
scene to be enacted and then give free play to bodily movements for its
expression, always keeping in rhythm with the song, so as to make sound and
motion a rhythmic unit.



THE LIFE OF THE CORN

A DRAMA IN FIVE DANCES


INTRODUCTION.--These Dances in their purport and music are taken from the
sacred rituals of the Omaha, the Osage and the Pawnee tribes. The richness
and beauty of symbolism in the original language suffer a loss of native
naïveté in their English interpretation.

The American food plant known by the general term "Corn" was developed ages
ago from certain native grasses. The _Euchlaena luxurians_ found in
Guatemala is probably an ancestor of the maize. The word "maize" belongs to
the language of a people living by the Caribbean Sea and never was a
universal term for corn among the Indians of our country. The tribes to
which maize was known gave it a name derived from their own languages. So
very many centuries have passed since corn was a grass that there is no way
now of finding out when in the remote past the natives of this continent
began the task of developing from a grass a staple article of food like the
corn. The process required years of careful observation, manipulation and
culture. Not only did the Indians accomplish this task but they took the
plant from its tropical surroundings and acclimated it throughout the
region east of the Rocky Mountains up to the country of short summers in