Alice Topp joined the Australian Ballet as a dancer in 2007 and is a coryphée with the company. She is also keen at developing her skills as a choreographer and has created four pieces for the company’s Bodytorque series, established to showcase new works by emerging dancemakers. In 2016, she created her first mainstage work for TAB, Little Atlas, which was met with much acclaim. She is now creating a new work called Aurum for the contemporary triple bill Verve. Created with the support of a Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance, awarded by The Joyce Theatre in New York, with major funding from the Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation, Aurum will play alongside Tim Harbour’s Filigree and Shadow, created for TAB in 2015, and Stephen Baynes’ Constant Variants, created for the company in 2007. She tells us about her new work.

Alice Topp dancing in Chroma for The Australian Ballet. Photograph © Lynette Will

How did Aurum come about?

I guess after the momentum of Little Atlas, which was a piece I did in 2016, and which was performed last year in Melbourne, I wanted to continue developing my choreographic voice and movement vocabulary. In our annual interviews with David...