Save the Last Dance - Harper's BAZAAR November 2021

Elite dancers train their whole lives only to be sent into retirement well before they reach their peak. Project Animo is dedicated to extending the careers of the performers who’ve exited stage left

For ballerinas, working from home is not exactly easy. A pirouette through the kitchen is ripe for disaster; a jeté over the coffee table is equally an accident waiting to happen. Yet across the country, in the 18 months since the pandemic called curtain on the performing arts industry, this is how dancers have survived — in some cases, literally.

It was a double blow for Alice Topp, a lifelong ballerina and one of The Australian Ballet’s most acclaimed award-winning young choreographers. Right before last year’s March lockdown, she retired at the age of 36 and found herself floating in a sort of suspended animation. “I was always going to retire at that season, but I thought I would have six weeks’ worth of shows to retire on — I ended up having three,” she says. “The performing arts evaporated overnight. There was no weaning off the adrenaline you have from shows. I liken it to running full pelt on a treadmill and then someone hits the emergency stop. There’s no wind down to a slow jog or a walk.”

On top of that, she — like everyone — was separated from her colleagues. “It was more brutal than I expected,” she says. “I had a whole identity crisis.” After speaking to other newly retired and isolated dancers, Topp realised she wasn’t alone. “Many of them also suffered from a loss of identity. You are a dancer — you’ve been that for your whole life — so where does that part of you go? What are you without this thing that has defined you?

“We had a lot of conversations saying: ‘Let’s make something borne from last year: from the frustration at not being able to do what we love, the sadness of watching our performing arts industry be decimated and the fear that we could lose an entire generation of creatives,’” Topp explains. And that’s exactly what she did. With the help of Jon Buswell, her longtime creative partner and the technical director of The Australian Ballet, Topp co-founded Project Animo, a performing arts collective that turns the traditional dance season model on its head. Locked-down and newly retired dancers from The Australian Ballet, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sydney Dance Company, Queensland Ballet, West Australian Ballet and the UK-based Studio Wayne McGregor will come together to work on a project-by-project basis, starting with a premiere season early next year. At Project Animo, no two seasons will be the same, and there is no hierarchy between dancers and choreographers: everyone is equal. “This is a chance for performers to share in this collaboration with other voices they’ve never worked with before,” says Topp. “They can learn and grow and share their kinetic wisdom. I think that’s an incredibly special, fertile ground for magic to happen.”

One of the pervasive myths of ballet, as with gymnastics, is that the athletes hit their peak in their twenties and thirties. As a result, most ballet dancers are forced into retirement by the time they reach their forties, sometimes earlier, despite having plenty of physical prowess and emotional depth left to give.

“As a dancer, you’re split in half: you’re expected to be an athlete and an artist,” Topp says, “but to learn your craft takes time. You don’t have the artistry in your younger years, but you do have the physicality, and there’s a lot forgiven for not having that emotional experience yet. Towards the end of your career, you’re only just starting to know how to express yourself and connect with your audience, but it’s almost like you lose your value because maybe you’re not as flexible or jumping as high. But what do you do with the other half, the artist? Where does that part go?” For some of Project Animo’s dancers, it was eschewed altogether (there’s the tradie and the teacher), while others pursued creativity in different forms (the filmmaker and the florist).

“That’s the main thing I want to focus on with Project Animo: these dancers have incredibly rich, virtuosic voices, and they know themselves, and they’ve spent their careers performing other characters. Now they want to tell their own stories on stage. It makes for a really rich experience: people are coming together to share their voices, opinions and ideas in a very safe space where everybody’s heard. It’s incredible to see everybody get so creative and really exercise part of themselves they’ve never had the opportunity to.”

The premiere season features five performances, many of which were crafted over Zoom. The schedule includes pieces choreographed by Cass Mortimer Eipper (Sydney Dance Company; The Australian Ballet), Izaac Carroll (Studio Wayne McGregor), Deborah Brown (Bangarra Dance Theatre) and Kristina Chan (independent).

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by I vana Martyn-Zyznikow.