The trailer of the 1970 film, “The City’s Dancer” (Raqqasah-yi-Shahr), presented its leading character as follows: “…Who was this woman who captured everyone’s attention? ...A devious heartbreaker, a young untamed beauty gone astray and become wild and rebellious …the starlet who yielded herself to the appetite of her rowdy spectators. The dancer, the dancer, the city’s best… Everyone has had a piece of this popular hand-me-down, but now this man’s hands will lead her down an unknown path…” As in many films of the pre-revolutionary cinematic genre of film-farsi, the cabaret dancer as a character type at once attracted viewers, incited them, and was condemned by them. In the social imagination and as a fictional character, the cabaret-dancer had been doomed by certain pre-existing myths: a failure of urban modernity, this deceived, needy woman deployed her sexuality to earn money to feed her family. Only a super-hero could save her from such public shame and transform her into a private family woman. The recurring presence of her seditious dancing body was a selling-factor that not only sustained the commercial film-i farsi, but saved the private-sector theatre of lalehzar, where her dance was presented as part of variety-shows or atraksion, since the mid 1950s. Some café and cabaret owners furthered their profit by vending their male customers the right to drink (fish-khuri) with her. The government also regulated her as a sex-worker, with routine medical exams a pre-requisite for her work permit. The media’s fascination with her and their fetishizing of her condemnation in the last years prior to the Revolution of 1979 made her an emblem of social corruption under Pahlavi’s Westernized cultural policies in the revolutionary discourse. Focusing on the multi-layered character of raqqas, this article explores her emergence in the context of rapid urban expansion as well as monetarisation of public entertainment in early 20th century Iran. Deploying interviews; visual, textual and movement analysis; and tracing the cabaret-dancer across multiple milieus of entertainment and adult industries, this article examines the construction of her fictive self onstage and in films. Shedding light on the dialogic relation between the myths surrounding the cabaret-dancer in her quotidian life and her fictive character, this paper also examines the social, bio-political and economic factors that conditioned the aesthetics and semiotics of her dancing body on stage and screen.