When former The Australian Ballet dancer Alice Topp choreographed her first full-length ballet Butterfly Effect with WA Ballet in 2025, she had already been toiling on another epic creative work, letting it bubble away in the background.
Six years in the making, the catalyst for her modern reimagining of Shakespeare tragedy Macbeth emerged during the COVID-19 2020 Melbourne lockdown, where the inactive time paralleled The Bard writing some of his greatest works as theatres closed during London’s bubonic plague outbreaks.
“It wasn’t like the dark story was born from the dark times,” 42-year-old Topp says, who these days lives in Central Victoria with her partner, You Am I frontman Tim Rogers.
“For me, there was no other story that I had ever really contemplated as a story ballet. I studied it (Macbeth) at school, I had my mum’s high school copy with her maiden name in it from when she was 15, and I’ve seen various theatre productions of Macbeth over the course of my time.
“I think that initially there were other stories Jon (set and lighting designer Jon Buswell) wanted to investigate, but I just couldn’t get past it. The poor thing had no choice.”
One of Topp’s long-time collaborators, Buswell is joined on the creative team by costume designer Aleisa Jelbart and dramaturg Ruth Little (the trio credited on Butterfly Effect), with composer Christopher Gordon, as the contemporary ballet foregoes the traditional classics — like Swan Lake paired with its Tchaikovsky score — for the freedom to roam and reflect current times.
The co-production between WA Ballet and Royal New Zealand Ballet — the latter company Topp also danced with during her career — replaces battlefields with boardrooms as the setting becomes the wild world of politics and media influencers.
“Macbeth is just timeless and those themes of ambition, betrayal, guilt and grief will always be relevant,” Topp says.
“It’s a psychological drama following Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and their desires and ambitions from the beginning to a very public decline, decay and erosion of their relationship . . . He acts on these desires to become a leader, and then essentially, his mind is his own undoing in the end.
“The global political instability and environmental instability, and turbulence is ripe for this story.”
The rise of influencers across social media platforms, and their meddling ability to forecast change, trends and alter algorithms has seen the traditional witches in Macbeth shape-shift to become “witchfluencers” as they play their role in the political ecosystem.
“People think, ‘Oh, we’re going to come along to the ballet and we’re going to see some fairies and some tulle, and we’re going to listen to very traditional classical music’, and this is so far from that,” Topp says.
“This is ballet that is digestible in a way that anybody could come and get something from it, regardless of whether you like ballet or Shakespeare or Macbeth, or whether you have any knowledge of it at all.”
Bringing cinematic qualities to the stage, film composer Gordon’s original score plays a large role in making Macbeth a ballet like audiences have not seen or heard before, where eight WA Symphony Orchestra musicians will perform live, layered with a recorded score featuring 126 guest artist musicians from around the world.
The result is a soundscape of music genres, from heavy metal, big band and funk, to progressive rock and EDM (electronic dance music).
“There are a lot of things that maybe a harp cannot capture on its own, so we were like, ‘Well, where can we go with this?’” Topp explains.
“Christopher Gordon’s a fan of heavy metal, and the work that we’d done previously was purely classical, but he’s done a lot of gaming, and he’s done film, including a horror film. He sent me some of that horror film score, and I instantly fell in love with the depth and breadth of what was possible.
“Things that you would never imagine in an orchestra pit, with all these electric guitars and extra percussionists. To make that possible, and to make the sound cinematic, it needed to be prerecorded because we couldn’t fit all 126 musicians in the orchestra pit.
“It was thrilling to choreograph too because it gave me a whole different palette that had never been available, and it really captured the world that we wanted to bring to life.”
Macbeth was unleashed on audiences in a world premiere performed by Royal New Zealand Ballet in Wellington in February, and will make its Australian premiere with WA Ballet in September, Topp thrilled to reunite with the dancers of WA Ballet in the rehearsal room.
“They believed in the vision of Butterfly Effect and they believed in the art we were creating together,” she shares.
“It makes returning here with another story just so fulfilling and rewarding because we’re building on a beautiful rapport.”
Macbeth is at His Majesty’s Theatre, September 4 to 19. Tickets at waballet.com.au.
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