Yingge · How it is danced

Yingge fuses dance, southern boxing routines and opera acting — that is the wording of the official project page overview; the Chaoyang project page has another passage, “combining drama, dance and martial arts”, and the two stand side by side, both recorded here as written. Below, the six are taken apart: mace technique, footwork, masks, formations, front and rear sections, costume. Wherever a statement belongs to one branch only, the paragraph says so outright and does not pass it off as province-wide.

The mace

Each dancer has two round wooden maces, one in each hand, struck up, down and to either side to the drums and gongs, head and body swaying naturally. Mace length differs by team: the project page records “10 cm in diameter, 20 cm long”, while the Chaoyang district standard gives “generally 40 cm to 61 cm”; the two differ by a factor of two, and the discrepancy is the first note at the end. Set names on the Puning branch include Spinning the Mace, Mace Flower, Washing the Street, New Year Greeting, Planting the Field, Mace on the Back, Through the Hip and Mace Hug with Hooked Foot (after the Puning project entry).

The Chaoyang branch divides by rhythmic pattern: the slow branch builds a set of three or four beats, and there is also a “drunken mace” in which the dancer looks like a drunkard; the fast branch divides into paired-combat sets, the Nanshan civil school and the Nanshan martial school (after the Chaoyang project entry).

Chaoyang district has a local standard, Intangible Cultural Heritage: Chaoyang Yingge, numbered DB 4405/T 315—2025. It was issued by the Shantou Market Supervision Administration on 24 February 2025 and took effect the next day; proposed and administered by the municipal culture, radio, television, tourism and sports bureau, it was drafted by, among others, the Mianbei Houxi, Wenguang Taoyuan, Caowei township, Chengnan Zhongjing and Ximen women’s Yingge teams, and by the Shantou Polytechnic.

It runs to 40 pages: chapter 5 basic technique, chapter 6 seven basic formations each with a floor plan, chapter 7 the three rhythmic patterns, Appendix A a chart of the costume and masks of the 108 heroes (drawings by the Houxi team), Appendix B costume. Most of the names in the paragraphs below come from this standard. Its beat cycles are concrete: the slow branch has a three-beat drum cycle and sets of three or four mace beats; the middle branch a five-beat cycle with sets of five or seven, or of eight, ten, eleven or thirteen;

the fast branch a seven-beat cycle. Mace technique splits into two classes and nine forms —Spinning the Mace and the striking mace. The spinning mace divides into inward and outward: inward, gripping the mace at its middle with the butt forward and turning the wrist from the butt so that the butt traces a vertical circle against the inner side of the forearm; outward is the reverse, head forward, circling against the outer side. Nine striking forms — the vertical strike, the two maces meeting above and below before the chest, the rising mace head striking the descending one;

the diagonal strike, a diagonal from the right hip past the front left of the head down to the left hip, the right mace striking the left at the start and the path then retraced symmetrically; the double toss strike, swinging out forward from beside the hip, striking before the chest, carrying the motion into a mace flower and raising it, then returning along the same path to strike again; the slicing strike, the two forearms parallel and facing each other, the upper mace slicing down at the lower and pushing it away;

the cross slide, the two maces crossed at the waist and struck together, one hand sliding forward while the other stays at the waist; the dart mace, the two heads crossed and held at the waist, one hand thrusting level forward while the other draws back; the downward thrust, the mace head driven down to strike the ground; the mace on the back, both hands behind the back, the two maces struck up and down; the under-hip mace, the two struck together below the hip, one before the other.

These names are set by the standard and are called differently elsewhere. The Puning branch’s names are Spinning the Mace, Mace Flower, Washing the Street, New Year Greeting, Planting the Field, Mace on the Back, Through the Hip and Mace Hug with Hooked Foot, which do not line up with the nine forms above — “mace on the back” exists on both sides, the rest need not be the same movement. When two names match, do not take them for one form.

Footwork

Take the horse-riding squat stance and spring sideways with the leg lifted. The Chaoyang entry describes the three temperaments more closely: the slow branch “slowness with momentum, momentum with spirit”, grave and expansive; the middle branch “poise with dash”; the fast branch has a tight drumbeat and formations that open and close with much change. These three are the Chaoyang branch’s division and elsewhere need not be cut this way.

The standard gives three basic steps: the lifting-tapping step, one foot stamping the ground and rising onto the toes while the other knee comes up about 90°, repeated left and right; the bow step, a long stride of four or five foot-lengths, the knee bent until the thigh is near horizontal, knee and toes pointing the same way; the horse stance, feet two or three foot-lengths apart, half-squatting with the thighs slightly above horizontal. Chen Laifa, interviewed in 2024, put the horse stance and the presence together: “Yingge contains southern boxing routines; only with the horse stance planted firm does it have presence when you jump.”

Masks

Painted after the Liangshan outlaws. Four common types cover most of it: red face with long beard, painted face with flame pattern, blue-green with taiji pattern, white face with black lines. There is no nationally uniform scheme; the same role changes ground colour and pattern from team to team.

Front section and rear section

A team is split into two sections, the front section (前棚) and the rear section (后棚): the front section is drum and gong music and the Yingge body itself, and the rear section is the small operas of their own kind and the signature turns. The front section is the trunk; the rear section depends on what the team can do.

Jiazi’s rear section has left titles: Damo Crossing Guanyin, Father and Daughter Meet, Two Bamboo Maces, Two Oars, plus comic pieces such as Stealing the Piglet, The Fool Visits the Hall, Husband Carrying Wife (after the Jiazi project entry). What other places perform in the rear section has not yet been gathered.

formations

The Puning branch records four: “Two Dragons Out to Sea”, “Tiger Descending the Mountain”, “Wheat Ear”, “Snail Spiral”; the appearance is led by the “head mace” and the “second mace”, with Shi Qian, the flea on the drum, going ahead carrying a cloth snake and the rest arranged in the guise of Liangshan outlaws. The formation follows the occasion: a great circle in the village clearing, a long column at the street mouth, two columns pushing forward on the temple forecourt (four measured sessions; see also Schools: Puning, Chaoyang, Jiazi). There is also a clip of two teams on one ground, again a ball court: each team rings itself, the centre left empty, everyone facing in.

The Chaoyang district standard fixes seven basic formations, each with its floor plan written out.Twin columns: two parallel columns flowing forward in symmetry, the commonest in procession.Square formation: two columns to a group, two groups side by side making a square.Two dragons to sea: two or four symmetric columns moving the same way, splitting from the middle of the team and gradually separating into single or double columns to left and right.Snail formation: everyone joined into one column, spiralling inward or outward from the very front into a circle.

Wheat-ear formation: two columns; the fuller one joins head to tail into a great flowing circle, the thinner one weaving through it in small circles the opposite way.Peace Across the Four Seas: four columns of equal numbers, each joined head to tail into a flowing circle, the four circles set symmetrically about a cross.Eight-Trigram Formation: two columns joined head to tail into an inner and an outer ring, the band standing in an S inside the inner ring with one man on either side, the whole making the eight-trigram figure.

These three names — “Two Dragons Out to Sea”, “Wheat Ear”, “Snail” — are also used on the Puning branch (see the paragraph above), and their floor plans are recorded as the standard writes them. Beyond the standard each team has its own names: the Houxi team reports Tiangang formation, Sky Full of Stars, Double Coins, Stars Around the Moon, Beating the Middle Street and Two Dragons Spitting Auspice; the Lingsha Gong team reports Big Figure 8, Small Figure 8, Twin Arrows Piercing the Clouds and Sky Full of Stars. The same name does not mean the same floor plan, and the two are not merged.

Names that can be tied to particular teams, as things stand:Houxi team is Miancheng middle branch; each dancer carries two 58 cm wooden maces; the formations it has reported are Tiangang formation, Sky Full of Stars, Double Coins, Stars Around the Moon, Beating the Middle Street and Two Dragons Spitting Auspice. Another report gives nine names — Two Dragons Out to Sea, Six Harmonies and the Cosmos, Tiangang Paying Homage, Four Seas Rejoicing, Eight Directions Answering, Twin Rings Counter-running, Eight-Trigram Formation, Sky Full of Stars, Stars Around the Moon.

Its leader Lin Fangwu says the most traditional method in the team is the “seven-star hammer”, and that the appearance always takes “Two Dragons Out to Sea”. Both pieces are from 2023 and concern the same team with different lists; the two are set side by side, not merged on anyone’s behalf.Lingsha Gong team was originally civil-school middle branch, its sets the Seven-Beat Set and the Eight-Beat Set, its formations Two Dragons Out to Sea, Big Figure 8, Small Figure 8 and Double Coins;

after the 1997 Chaoyang Yingge arts festival it switched to the Nanshan civil-school fast branch, changing its sets to nine including Horse Battle and Breaking the Pass and adding Twin Arrows Piercing the Clouds and Sky Full of Stars.Nanshan divides into a civil and a martial school: in the civil school the later-column dancers hold a small drum in one hand and a stick in the other, and “crossing the river” occurs in the course of it; the martial school has no crossing, and instead inserts a “striking passage” of twenty-odd to thirty-odd beats into the formation changes.

On big occasions the names are counted differently. At the 2024 National Day beach show in Chaoyang, 10 teams performed the spinning mace, the single mace and the double mace, with single, double, three-sided and four-sided strikes, and ran through more than twenty formations including “Two Dragons Out to Sea”, “Wheat Ear” and “Double Coins”; in the “Two Dragons Out to Sea” section the 10 teams split into two routes and paraded along the shore. The women’s teams compose their own sets too: besides the old routines the Ximen Women’s Yingge Team has composed the ten-beat set “Two Phoenixes Greeting Spring” and the twelve-beat set “Hundred Phoenixes in Flight”.

Costume

The Puning branch records “warrior garb, tight short jackets”; mask, costume and props together identify the man.

The forms have names. The standard divides costume into two by mask: opera-face masks go with opera dress, close to the short-jacketed martial role of opera, colour prized for brilliance; ghost-face masks go with black clothes and trousers, or white, close to the folk figures of the Black and White Impermanence. Four kinds of headgear:the helmet is worn by military roles, with pom-poms on top, a cape behind, some with pheasant tails; the one Guan Sheng wears is called “Jianying”, the one Shi Jin wears “Yinglaobao”;the gauze cap is worn by non-military roles and includes the arhat cap, the hexagonal cap and the foreign cap;the straw hat is in fact cloth, and some have no crown, being called the “straw-hat ring” or the “soldier’s cap”;

there is also the head cloth used together with the caps. Clothes come in three kinds:the hero’s coat, large collar and front opening, embroidered braid along the hem, a waist sash, cuffs and trouser legs tied tight;the flaunt coat, worn by Shi Qian, with rows of knotted buttons from collar to hem, in embroidered and plain versions;the armour, worn by military roles, a tiger’s head embroidered on the front and called the “armour belly”; the women’s armour carries dozens of coloured streamers from waist to foot.

Footwear: men wore straw sandals early on and now mostly the coir sandal, that is the arhat shoe; women always wear embroidered shoes. Yingge costume has no water sleeves, so that the movement stays brisk.

Tied to a particular team, as things stand, one:the Ximen Women’s Yingge Team dress in the red-and-green uniform of the sword-and-horse female role, the red playing Hua Mulan and the green Mu Guiying; the make-up is fresh, a “fire” character painted on the forehead, which the team says takes in both unity and “women not giving way to men”. The team’s movement borrows the basic footwork of the men’s Yingge and folds in the steps and poses of opera dance, so it moves lightly.

Fabric, colour and embroidery by team still have no team-by-team record. This layer the standard cannot supply either — it writes forms, not which cloth a team used in which year, what dye, what pattern.

Team size depends on manpower and money: 24, 36, 72 and so on; another reading fills the establishment of the 108 Liangshan heroes yet fields 107 — Lu Junyi is the man being rescued and does not enter the ranks, hence one fewer. This reading appears in teams’ own accounts and in reporting; the official project page never writes 107, and it cannot be taken to mean that every team fields that establishment (see “107 and 108 are two measures”).