What makes the twentieth century performer of the minstrel mutribi scene—the heir to several centuries of Iranian performance history—“dissolute” and “unworthy” instead of an archetype of the national culture? Why do most historical accounts of Iranian theatre exclude the post-1950 Lalehzar theatrical scene when it became a venue for mutribs and their female dancing? What makes the majority of private sector films produced between 1950 and 1979 the objects of dismissal by being termed filmfarsi? And what made the cabaret/café scene of Pahlavi era a “spectacle of vice” and its female performer an emblem of social corruption? This paper looks for the reasons underlying the ideological, economic, and practical treatment of these key constituents of popular culture in twentieth century Iran, making them occupy a “negative space” in historical narratives and typecasting them as “others” against whom national and artistic subjects defined themselves: they were at times labeled “traditional” or “un-modern” in order to contrast and signify the “modern”, marginalized to highlight the mainstream, marked as “illiterate” and “low” to emphasize the “elite” and “high”, and were a measurement of “vice” in contrast to “virtue”. By making use of periodicals, literature pertaining to theatre, music, and cinema, and governmental documents and by tracing the (female) dancing body through various performance spaces, this paper explores the socio-political discourses surrounding the performing arts and popular culture and seeks to examine the emergence, re-configuration, and ideological and economic applications of 20th century cultural categories in defining and conditioning the aesthetics, semiotics, affects, and ethics of the onstage performer. This includes the impetuses behind the selection (and elimination) of cultural motifs from ancient symbolism, literature, folklore, mysticism, and religious rituals, as well as the use of European art forms in the construction of new virtuous and “national(ist)” performing bodies. The shifting dynamics of the body in public space, as they relate to urban transformations, the states’ top-bottom implementations in establishing various institutions, the competing conceptions of discipline and regulatory systems as pertaining to public space, and the bio-economy of the dancing body in relation to the income of the performance space, are other factors that I consider in this paper.