Music and dance, as materialized through their performing subjects, are powerful tools for articulating nationalist history. Such an expressive embodiment of history and identity is an integral part of the Assyrian worldview that serves to unite and consolidate this ethnic and religious minority that inhabits the borders of Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Violence and conflict have led the majority of Assyrians to flee their homelands, creating a global diaspora with significant populations in the global north. Interrogating the close connection between expressive culture and ethnic identity, this paper examines the practice and polysemics of the traditional Assyrian line dance sheikhani in a transnational performance context. Assyrians participate in sheikhani at events such as weddings and various public occasions. Many believe that sheikhani derives from the pre-battle warm-up of the Assyrian mountain warriors of Tiyari (present day Çukurca, Turkey), archetypal figures transmitted in their oral and nationalist history. The erasure of Tiyari in contemporary cartography adds representational import to its documentation as a reminder of the historical presence of Assyrians in the region, and their systematic persecution—song and dance being a means by which this mapping may be accomplished. Sheikhani, as a case in point, illustrates how traditional dance acts as an “instant embodied communal reference” or an emblem of ethnic identity that is instrumental in conveying cultural representation. Social anthropologist Jane Cowan theorizes dance as a heightened aesthetic and sensuous state that reinforces particular social meanings. Drawing from Cowan’s theory, I argue that sheikhani is a topographical and historical articulation of both Assyrian ethnic and national identity that is materialized through the body-politic. Framing the nation as an imagined community, I explore how the performance of sheikhani engenders a collective consciousness as it temporarily demarcates the space of performance as an imagined Assyria, and serves as a vehicle for the migration of memory from which the past informs the present. How do Assyrians engage with their past through material cultural forms as they simultaneously vie to assert themselves as a political entity within their homeland, yet must struggle for cultural survival in an increasingly diasporic condition? The data for this paper was drawn from ethnographic fieldwork which includes interviews and audiovisual materials documenting several Assyrian community events in Toronto, Ontario (2014-2016).