The proposed paper offers a genealogy of the Iranian ‘high art’ theatrical dance genre, known as “national dance” (raqs-i milli), and explores the ways in which the female national dancer was constructed to present an ideal modern Iranian woman on stage. Invented in the 20th century in an emerging nationalist performing arts context, raqs-i milli is a modern choreographic genre which often claims an authentic past. Encompassing change and continuity, the choreographic works in this genre have often been constructed through the innovative use of ideas, movements and aesthetics throughout the 20th century. The public (modern) dancing body was exposed in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century, when, with the development of urban public life, new hetero-social sites of sociability were created in large cities of Iran. The influence of European theatrical dance culture, along with the rise of nationalism in Iran and the support of the Pahlavi government, fostered the development of the new artistic genre of national dance, in which the dancing body’s appearance and actions were “purified” from those negative characteristics associated with the corrupt entertainment dance scene. The national dancer sought to portray her “modern” Iranian identity through the newly-invented “authentic” medium of raqs-i milli and manifested the bio-ideology of the Pahlavi state, an ideology that sought to recover Iran’s glorious ancient past as it leaped forward towards a “great civilization” (tamaddun-i buzurg). This paper explores the dancing body on the public stage in the nationalist milieu of Iran in early 20th century, when it was performed as part of the theatrical environment, and after the mid- 1940s, when dance gained an independent status. While the nationalist biopolitics that regulated the stage also shaped the staged dancing subject, the common dance-related intellectual trends influenced the aesthetics of national. Examining the national dancer, this paper explores how the high-art dancer of raqs-i milli dissociated with the image of its contemporaneous dancing subject of the popular scene of cabaret, raqqas, and its traditional counterpart, bachah- raqqas, in her regulated representation of her female sexuality (or femininity). Finally, this article explores the invention of this dance genre as a nationalist product, and the ways in which the female national dancers of this genre embody the ideas, aesthetics and ethics of Iranian nationalism and modernity.