As American an art form as the blues, modern dance was once also a protest art surreptitiously and pleasurably swathed in sensuality. For nascent feminism, there was Isadora Duncan flouncing about in Grecian drapery, and for anti-war sentiment Martha Graham offered an Amazon “specter” who gathered and dispensed trouble in the volumes of her skirt. In the early heat of the civil-rights movement, Alvin Ailey took up the political mantle simply by putting black experience onstage, replacing the prevailing cartoonish stereotypes with dances of unpronounced dignity, hard-won optimism, and pantherine power. READ ON