ALICE TOPP

Born and raised in Bendigo, Alice Topp started her dancing career with the Royal New Zealand Ballet. She joined The Australian Ballet as a dancer in 2007, where her choreographic identity first emerged. Her premiere work, Trace, was created for their 2010 season of its choreographic showcase Bodytorque. Between 2011 and 2014, Topp would go on to create three more works for Bodytorque, refining her craft and gaining the attention of critics and company directors alike. In 2016, she choreographed the critically acclaimed work Little Atlas, which appeared on The Australian Ballet’s 2016 and 2017 mainstage Symphony in C program. Topp created Aurum in 2018, her first mainstage one act work, which was created with the support of a Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance. It premiered as part of the company’s Verve program and went on to debut internationally in 2019 at New York’s leading contemporary dance venue, The Joyce Theater.

Topp was appointed one of The Australian Ballet’s Resident Choreographers in 2018. She was invited to spend a month with Studio Wayne McGregor in the United Kingdom in 2019, creating Clay a piece for The Grange Festival, which went on to form the basis for a larger work titled Logos for The Australian Ballet’s 2020 Volt program.

Since retiring as a dancer, Topp has created Annealing for the company’s Instruments of Dance program in 2022 and Solstice for Dance X. In the same year, she restaged Aurum with the Royal New Zealand Ballet and created a new work for their digital season, Absence of Light. In 2023 she premiered Open Heart Story for West Australian Ballet’s Ballet at the Quarry season, restaged Logos for the Royal New Zealand Ballet and created a new work for Singapore Ballet titled After Happy Ever, all whilst continuing to progress Project Animo, the company she founded with longtime collaborator Jon Buswell. Topp was nominated for a Green Room Award (Little Atlas, 2017) and for three Australian Dance Awards (Aurum, 2018, Same Vein, 2014, Trace, 2010). In 2019, Aurum saw Topp and her creative team win the Helpmann Award for Best Ballet, and a nomination for an Australian Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography.

Topp created her first work for Ballett Companie Oldenburg, Soft Knocks, in 2025 and another the following year, Algorithm, premiering in Germany in January 2026. After the New Zealand premiere of Macbeth in February with the Royal New Zealand Ballet, which featured in the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts and Auckland Arts Festival, Alice most recently created Sisu for Houston Ballet’s An Evening with The Stars program, premiering in May at the Wortham Theater, Houston.

In 2025, Topp created Butterfly Effect, her first full-length narrative ballet on West Australian Ballet.