Range Song is a kind of folk dance popular in the north of China, originated from agricultural labor, has a long history. It is mainly performed on New Year's Day to add to the festive and joyful atmosphere, with free and improvised dance styles, and no strict fixed norms for movement. Generally, the dancers dress up as various characters, holding fans, handkerchiefs, colored silks and other props and dance, participating in the performance of a large number of people to drums and gongs, suona accompaniment. In some places, there are lion dances, dragon lanterns, dry boats and other performances interspersed in the rice-planting teams. Because of the wide range of popular areas, each has a different style and characteristics. For example, according to the region, there are Shanbei Yangge, Northeast Yangge, Shanxi Yangge, Hebei Yangge and so on. The form of Yangge is simple and lively, full of expressive power, and is welcomed by the masses of peasants.
In the New Year and Spring Festival of 1943, the teachers and students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts and Letters in Yan'an formed a rice-planting song team to perform in the street squares, utilizing the folk form of rice-planting song to express the support for the army, production, learning and culture, and other fresh content closely related to the vast number of workers, peasants, soldiers and revolutionary cadres at that time. Because these programs, after the old rice-planting songs were improved and created with new forms and contents, they were called new rice-planting songs. Soon after, the new rice-planting songs soon spread to the Shanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border area and the neighboring Jinsui border area, forming a vibrant, lively and red-hot mass cultural movement.
New Yangge penetrated into the vast countryside and the army, and people drew on the life and events that we cared about to stage a number of plays with fresh content and lively forms, such as Brother and Sister Opening the Land, Couple Literacy, Niu Yonggui Hanging the Color, and the Habitual Bandit Zhou Zishan, etc. These dramas with songs and dances were the Yangge Opera. Yangge Opera retains the vivid and lively features of traditional Yangge, and at the same time extensively absorbs the factors of local operas, folk songs and dances as well as dramas and dances, making it a comprehensive art form that combines drama, music and dance in one furnace to express the new life and exuberant moods of the people in the liberated areas. This art form not only makes the ancient traditional rice-planting song glowing with artistic youth, but also lays a strong foundation for the creation and performance of new operas in China, opening up a broad path.