Staging Egypt – Panel Canonizing Egypt Beginning in the 1950s, Abdel Gamal Nasser and his regime undertook the project of valorizing the Egyptian peasant. This decision was made in the midst of the socialist bloc undertaking what I term the age of “Staging the Folk” in which, beginning with the Soviet Union with the establishment of the State Academic Ensemble of Dances of the Peoples of the USSR (known in the West as the Moiseyev Dance Company), all of the socialist states and prominent regions within them, as well as states under their influence like Egypt, established companies that produced mass spectacle through the presentation of folk dance and music, never before seen on such a scale. In Egypt, Mahmoud Reda (1930-2020), founded his first dance company which grew from some 30 members, to reach nearly 150 dancers, musicians, and support staff a few years later. Due to his success, in 1961, the Ministry of Culture adopted the company as a state-supported dance company for purposes of representing Egypt both at home and abroad. Reda faced several issues, not facing other artistic directors. 1. Belly dance was the primary form of both domestic and professional indigenous dance in Egypt, performed by men, women and children of all ages and all classes. Other than solo improvised dance and combat dances, little else existed in the relatively homogeneous folklore genres of dance from which Reda could create choreographies. In addition, professional belly dance was, and continues to be, linked to prostitution. 2. Because of this linkage, finding dancers was very difficult. 3. Prior to the adoption of the company, the financing of such an ensemble was very difficult. This presentation looks at the work of Mahmoud Reda, in which that I will argue, as he stated several times, that, in spite of the claims of extensive research that he undertook, he created a new genre of dance, an invented tradition, in which he restricted the movements of belly dance for the female dancers to understated undulations, fully covered, especially in the beginning of the company, and did not permit the men to perform belly dance movements at all. For the men, he created an entirely new genre of dance and movement that never existed before, in order to distance his new genre of folk dance from belly dance (raqs baladi) as far as possible.