Performing Cultural Diplomacy: Formative Choreographies of Pakistan’s National Song and Dance Ensemble

Abstract

During the Cold War, dance emerged as an important instrument of soft power. In pursuit of cultural diplomacy, choreographers who settled in Pakistan after Partition repurposed South Asian dance traditions shaped by 1930s revivalism in colonial India while also incorporating socialist aesthetics through Sino–Pakistani cultural exchanges. Moving beyond hybridity discourse, this article proposes a new approach to studying South Asian dance by extending Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia to embodied performance. Through archaeological, Islamic, regional, and socialist registers, Pakistan’s National Song and Dance Ensemble’s formative choreographies—Sons of the River, Mohenjodaro Dance, and Heer–Ranjha—produced internationally legible narratives of Pakistan’s cultural distinctiveness.