ABSTRACT
In a 1986 article entitled ‘The Metamorphoses of a Beautiful Witch’, the critic Marcelle Michel called Carolyn Carlson ‘a sort of distant cousin of Isadora Duncan… [who] quite purely and simply expressed her life in terms of dance, and it is precisely in this manner that her inspiration finds constant renewal.’1 The importance of Carolyn Carlson on the European dance scene is probably revealed more by the numerous groups and dancers that her teaching has influenced than by her own career, which has often received mixed reviews from the critics. While only occasionally belying her qualities as a dancer of rare technical ability and unique poetic interpretation, her choreographic works have often come in for some negative criticism.
