'Swan' Alice Topp glides into new arena at the Australian Ballet

Alice Topp knows what it’s like, she says cheerfully, to be ''one of 24 swans''. She’s been a member of the corps de ballet at the Australian Ballet for eight years, and the focus for her is very much on being part of an ensemble.

Yet she also has an ambition that would set her apart in a new way: she dreams of being a choreographer-in-residence at the Australian Ballet.

She’s in the midst of creating her fourth piece for the company, for its short Bodytorque season. This is a program of new works by emerging choreographers, who are often from the ranks of the AB’s dancers. Bodytorque has been staged every year in Sydney for more than a decade: this is the first opportunity that Melbourne will have the chance to see it. And Topp, who hails from Bendigo, is looking forward to having friends and family in the audience.

But choreography wasn’t an ambition, Topp says, until ''it came to me by chance''. It was in 2010, when a Bodytorque participant went on maternity leave, and the company’s artistic director, David McAllister, was keen to find a female replacement.

Even then, it wasn’t Topp’s idea to step up. Nicolette Fraillon, the company’s conductor, encouraged Topp to take the chance. ''I don’t know what it was that she saw in me,'' Topp says, but Fraillon suggested her to McAllister. He gave her a weekend to think it over, and she found it impossible to say no to such an opportunity. ''I thought, it could be a shambles, but it would be a shame if I didn’t take up the challenge.''

For Bodytorque, the participants are given a broad theme: for Topp’s first year, it was ''A la mode''. She decided to create a simple pas de deux, ''to have a play and to workshop with the designers''. The theme encouraged her to explore the nature of fabrics with fashion designers Crystal Dunn and Georgia Lazzaro. The relationship – the tensions and interactions – between body, garment and fabric became integral to the development of the piece.

She wanted to make the most of the opportunity to focus specifically on the qualities of the individual dancers she was working with, ''and developing movement that’s uniquely suited to them, that’s sort of custom made''.

She responds differently each year to Bodytorque, she says, depending on the people involved. She sees herself as developing her own dance vocabulary, but in an open way. She likes to comes in with a few ideas, ready to be flexible, to see what the dancers make of them.

''It’s a question and answer thing between us – between an idea I have, and their interpretation of it, as opposed to me being very rigid.''

In 2011, the theme was ''muse'', and her inspiration was a photograph, a double portrait of indigenous actor Jack Charles that consisted of two images taken 30 years apart. This year, Topp and four other choreographers are working with the theme of DNA.

''It was initially quite a struggle,'' she says. Pondering the idea of a genetic blueprint for the individual, ''I started to think about the things we share, the commonalities, the ways in which we are the same. The fact that we all bleed, we all die, we all love, we all want to be happy, to be healthy. And it doesn’t matter what your religion is, where you’re from, what your choices or preferences are.''