Bill T Jones claims that he has mellowed with age, but there's no question that the trajectory of his 20-year career has been heavily fuelled by anger. The ferocity with which he has embraced being black, gay and HIV positive; the ferocity with which his dances have battled the prejudice attached to those labels; the ferocity of his determination to make the stage "a place of public witness" - all have made him a notorious figure in his profession.

He was never more so than in 1994, when his production Still/Here was condemned by the influential New Yorker critic Arlene Croce as "victim art". The work was a study of social attitudes to death in which Jones drew directly on the words and gestures of terminally ill patients, and it was the actuality of his material that caused Croce to complain that the work was too raw to review.

Croce's comments put Jones in the middle of an incendiary debate raging in the American arts community about political engagement. Did Still/Here represent a nadir of emotionally manipulative, political correctness? Or was it a brave voice, airing important issues in what seemed then to be an increasingly depoliticised scene?

Jones's revised version of Still/Here, incorporating his own response to that controversy, can be seen during his upcoming UK tour. But 10 years on, the most interesting issue raised by the debate may be the fact it was provoked by a piece of dance. Had Jones created a book, a play or a film, his attempt to document and politicise the process of dying would almost certainly have passed without comment.

It's remarkable how prevalent is the assumption that dance draws up its skirts in panicked withdrawal from anything resembling real life. Yet while Jones has been one of the profession's most visible ideologues, he is by no means a lone figure.

In the arena of sexual politics, for instance, there is no art form better equipped to portray the physical dynamics of relationships or to confront the issue of body image. In fact, rewriting the roles of men and women has been one of the major choreographic projects of the past 100 years.

The 1920s were marked by Bronislava Nijinska's rebellious feminist satires, and the 1930s by Martha Graham's ritualised images of female power and protest. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a collective assault on physical stereotyping; the 1980s ushered in Lloyd Newson's savage anatomising of male alienation and aggression.

But dance can engage with wider issues than gender and sexuality, as a random sampling of the current repertory makes clear. Ghost Dances, Christopher Bruce's elegy for the oppressed peasants of South America, is now a classic, while recent pieces by Darshan Singh Bhuller have dealt with love in war-torn Bosnia and the trauma of child abduction.

Alain Platel's stories of urban wasteland have acquired a cult status, as has the choreography of his one-time protege Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose work Foi (returning to London this week) is one of the most haunting responses to the post-9/11 world that has appeared on the international stage.

What is common to all these choreographers is their assumption that real life is a natural, even necessary subject for them. Newson has frequently expressed his impatience with dance that is merely "beautiful wallpaper", while Bhuller has said that making dance is his way of "facing up to horror and evil".

Platel describes the damage and dereliction he portrays as something that's "around us... it feels like I have to be a witness to it", and Cherkaoui believes passionately that "you have to engage with the world to influence it. I see everything I do as communication: making a dance, having a conversation, giving an interview - it's all political."

While these choreographers make a strong case for their responsibility to the world outside the studio, dance does suffer one major handicap as a political art form: its lack of words. Bhuller may be able to evoke with harrowing physicality the suffering of his Bosnian lovers in Planted Seeds, but the creation of a project such as The Permanent Way, David Hare's detailed docu-drama about the railways, is not an option for him or any other choreographer.

Movement may be more powerful and subtle than text when it comes to capturing the visceral dynamics of emotion, the sensual texture of experience. But it can present only the most generalised of facts, the most obvious of symbols, the most stereotypical of narratives. It can't analyse, it can't argue, it can't contextualise.

It is because of this inbuilt disadvantage that some choreographers deliberately limit their engagement with issues other than dance. Siobhan Davies, for instance, is evangelical in her belief that choreography has a unique ability to reveal intimate truths about our humanity, and it's precisely because she reveres her art form that she loathes the idea of making it look inadequate. Davies is not short on political convictions, but she says: "If I wanted to talk about feminism, I wouldn't use dance."

Nor would Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Naharin has earned a high profile from his public condemnations of Israeli assaults on Palestinians and from the exchanges he has initiated between Arab artists and his own dance company, Batsheva. But he has always drawn a line between these activities and his motivation as an artist.

"In interviews I can voice anger," he says. "If you write that I think my prime minister is a bully and that 80% of my people are living under a big delusion, I'm happy. But I don't care that it will come across in [my work] That's not why I create... It's composition that turns me on."

Merce Cunningham, a sophisticated master of pure dance invention, has put it more simply. He cannot imagine why any choreographer would try to handle complex political issues when, in his view, the effect can only be like "sending a message on a postcard".

In some ways, Cunningham's more ideologically ambitious colleagues would accept that words are more effective than dance as a tool for documentation and persuasion. Bill T Jones and Lloyd Newson are among many who have made extensive use of text in their works, bolstering it with video footage and theatrical props.

Non-dance methods are often the fastest and clearest ways of delivering a message, as Jones demonstrated in his recent work Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger. One version of this dance is performed to the accompaniment of a disturbing short story by Flannery O'Conner about racism in the Deep South, while the other is performed without any text at all. The impact of the two versions is dramatically different.

However, the lack of specificity in dance is also a source of its power and provocation. Cherkaoui's Foi addresses the way that faith and obsession can both unite and divide the world, the way one group's wrong can be another group's right. "Each person," he argues, "has their own truth about history."

What he prizes in dance is the fact that it is more open-ended than any verbal argument. "It's so subjective: each person can read their own story in it, and one image can mean several things." He cites one of the characters in Foi who wears a pair of boxing gloves decorated with the US flag. "Everyone reads that as an image of American aggression - but one effect of the gloves is that the woman is disabled, she can't handle anything properly. She is the victim as well as the butcher."

Like Platel, Cherkaoui has a particular gift for sketching in his works the outlines of big issues and then zoning in on individual characters and moments of experience with sharp and unsettling physical detail. It was in just such a wordless manner that Jones made his most vivid statement.

During the 1980s, he performed and choreographed with his real-life partner, Arnie Zane, until the latter died from Aids. The two men made an extreme, extraordinary pair - Jones big, muscled and black, Zane tiny, fierce and white. At that time, it was still exceptional to see two men dancing together so intimately, let alone two gay men of different colour. No medium other than dance could have got under the skin of that relationship so fast and revealed so directly both its lived reality and its symbolic value. The fact that dance is, uniquely, created out of live human bodies will always be its most potent political weapon.

· The Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company UK tour opens at The Swan, High Wycombe (01494 512000), on Tuesday. Foi opens at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SE1 (08703 800400), on Thursday.