limited artistic freedom and improvisation with specific guidelines that the dance must adhere to including: prohibition of male performers to dress as women; elimination of any flirtatious or erotic moves; forbiddened the portrayal of ghosts, deities, Buddhist monks, and Daoist priests (elements that were common in rural yangge); no vulgarity or negative portrayals of the working class in the dances, and dancers were not permitted to wear excessive makeup. The power of the struggle yangge came from the dance’s simplicity and visibility, aimed at reaching a larger and wider audience. Unlike rural yangge with its complex and vast dance patterns, struggle yangge utilized simpler dance moves such as Double Cabbage Heart (spiraling move) and Dragon Waves Its Tail (snakelike movement) to, as one yangge dancer puts it, “to express an exuberant mood and to invite as many people as possible to share in the joy”. Struggle yangge’s purpose was to tell a story about the success of the CCP developments, of how the Communists came to power, about the valor and strength of the People’s Liberation Army, the undying support of the Chinese people, the righteous leadership of the CCP, and the bright socialist future of China. The story was told in three musical performances, consisting of song and dance, with the production of these performances in chronological order to achieve maximum impact. The first was The Great Yangge of the Celebration of Liberation (庆祝解放大秧歌), which told the war of liberation from the Nationalists. The second piece was The Great Musical of Long Live the People’s Victory (人民胜利万岁大歌舞), which illustrated the remembrance of the people’s victory in the revolution. The last musical was The Great Yangge of Building the Motherland (建设祖国大秧歌), which depicts the construction of a new socialist country under the leadership of the CCP. The production of each performance was elaborate and complex, with shows lasting four to five hours. Types There are two major types of yangge, one is Stilt Yangge which is performed on stilts, the other is Ground Yangge which is more common and is performed without stilts. Another version of the yangge is the village play, an anthology of which was published by Sidney D. Gamble in 1970, based on transcriptions made by Li Jinghan as part of the Ding Xian Experiment's surveys in the 1930s. The Yangge drama or Yangge opera () usually consists of a quatrain of seven stanzas or long and