When Alice Topp hung up her pointe shoes after nearly two decades dancing on some of Australia’s most revered stages, she knew she wasn’t finished with ballet – she was just ready to challenge it.

Now, with Butterfly Effect, her first full-length ballet, Topp brings to West Australian Ballet a story as expansive and delicate as its name suggests. Inspired by chaos theory, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and the harsh beauty of contemporary life, the production reimagines what ballet can be – grounded, relevant, and deeply human.

The protagonist Charlie isn’t a princess, swan, or sugar plum. She’s a medic. A mother. A soldier. A woman. And she is transforming.

Here, Topp, costume designer Aleisa Jelbart, and WAB Artistic Director David McAllister sit down with RUSSH to explore what it means to choreograph freedom, and why this ballet might just change everything.

RUSSH: Alice, you’ve spoken before about feeling frustrated with the roles women traditionally play in ballet. How did that inform Butterfly Effect?

Topp: I danced as snowflakes, fairies, nymphs. I’ve been broken-hearted, tragic, ethereal – rarely real. And that just doesn’t reflect the women I know.

With Butterfly Effect, I wanted to put a woman on stage who feels familiar. Someone courageous, conflicted, flawed. Charlie is all of that. She’s in love, she’s afraid, she fights for others. She carries grief, guilt, responsibility. She’s modern. And I think that complexity is what makes her beautiful.

McAllister: It’s a bold choice. To take Madame Butterfly, this very 19th-century tale, and recenter it not around the tragedy of a man’s regret, but the strength of a woman who survives – that’s contemporary ballet at its best.

RUSSH: Let's talk about Madame Butterfly as a starting point. Obviously, Butterfly Effect draws inspiration from the original ballet, but not in the way audiences might expect.

Topp: I love the Puccini score, but I never felt comfortable with the opera’s narrative. The John Luther Long version – where she escapes with her child, rather than dies – that was much more compelling to me.

That idea of a woman walking away from an oppressive relationship, choosing to survive, to fight for her child and herself – it’s a narrative we need more of. It’s not passive. It’s powerful.

McAllister: And that shift mirrors a bigger conversation in ballet. We’ve long revered the tragic heroine. But what about the woman who refuses to collapse? What about resilience?

RUSSH: The idea of transformation– personal, emotional, political – runs through the production. What does it mean for Charlie to transform?

Topp: She never leaves the stage. We see her shift in real time – falling in love, giving birth, deploying overseas, returning home changed.

She is the butterfly. She cocoons. She breaks apart. She emerges. That metaphor guided everything – from choreography to costume to music.

Jelbart: We built Charlie’s journey into the fabric. Her first costume is this flowing, unstructured linen shirt – it moves with her, almost swims around her. It tells us she’s free, relaxed, outdoorsy. Then we see her in fatigues, in conflict zones, in chaos. Her world tightens.

Colour, cut, texture – all of it tells a story of who she is and where she’s going.

RUSSH: Aleisa, you mentioned observing everyday people to build the characters. How did that play into your designs?

Jelbart: We started with the characters – who is Charlie? What does she eat? Where does she shop? What’s her relationship to nature, to motherhood, to authority? Those long Zooms with Alice, just unpacking her world, were essential.

From there, I looked at real-life uniforms – military, medical – and reworked them into something danceable. Movement is everything in ballet. You can’t restrict the body. So we softened silhouettes, added slits, created garments that move with emotion.

And then there’s the context – heat, landscape, Western Australia’s eucalyptus tones, its steely sky. It’s all embedded in the palette.

Topp: I remember saying early on, “Let’s throw out tulle and tiaras.” This story deserves fabric that breathes, sweats, survives.

RUSSH: Ballet doesn’t use words. How do you choreograph grief? Motherhood? Conflict?

Topp: I ask the dancers: where do you feel grief? In your chest? Your stomach? What happens to your vision, your breath, your posture?

That becomes the language. Body language. A thousand silent ways to say what words can’t.

The body is where the emotion lives. In Charlie’s case, that includes the physical toll of her work, the ache of separation, the violence of war. There’s no miming – we work from real emotion, and let the body tell the story.

RUSSH: The score reinterprets Puccini. What was that collaboration like?

Topp: Jessica Wells is a genius. She didn’t just re-orchestrate Puccini – she rebuilt it. She took arias and rearranged them into something cinematic, human, contemporary.

It’s not chronological. We don’t follow the opera’s plot. Instead, we mapped Puccini’s music to moments in our story – a wedding, a farewell, a night patrol. And in between, Jess composed new pieces that live in today’s world.

It’s like hearing a memory and a heartbeat at the same time.

RUSSH: What role does environment play on stage?

Topp: Jon Buswell’s designs make you feel where you are. It’s not a backdrop – it’s a living, breathing space.

Charlie’s worlds shift – home, wedding, war – and the set shifts with her. It’s immersive. Bark, soil, shadow, structure – they change with her emotions.

We wanted the audience to sense that tension: how the land holds you, and how it breaks you. And in that way, the set becomes an extension of Charlie’s inner world.

RUSSH: What do you hope audiences take away?

Jelbart: That ballet can be about them. About people they know. About now.

Topp: I want them to walk away having felt something they can’t quite name. To think differently about who gets to be the centre of a story. To question old narratives.

To see a woman who is real – working, loving, losing, surviving – and say, “That’s me. I know her.”

McAllister: And to see that ballet is not a museum piece. It’s alive. It evolves. Butterfly Effect isn’t just a story about transformation – it is the transformation.

Butterfly Effect will run from 5–20 September 2025, at His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth; accompanied live with West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Tickets are on sale now at waballet.com.au.