“I’m just a Brissie boy,” is how 23-year-old ballet dancer Joel Burke, co-founder of Ballet International Gala (B.I.G.) describes himself.

Burke is no novice.

A tap dancer as a boy, studying at Kick Dance Studio, he went on to spend four years at Queensland Ballet Academy with Paul Boyd and Christian Tátchev, and became a Prix de Lausanne competitor. In 2023 he was co-star of the dance movie, The Red Shoes: Next Step. 

Burke was well on the way to dance celebrity when he won the cover model prize for New Energetiks’ dancewear and the world could have been his oyster, but he came to the conclusion that he truly was a Brissie boy and that it was “time for ballet to become accessible for everyone”.

During covid, together with his mate Khalid Tarabay, he launched B.I.G. at Queensland Performing Arts Centre in January 2022 and sold out.

“It showed that there was an appetite for ballet, we realised that this could go to every capital city,” he tells me by phone from Brisbane. 

The rest is history. This is the fifth version of a gala program featuring some of the world’s most famous dancers.

Big names poured in, including principal artists from The Royal Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Teatro Alla Scala, Mariinsky Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Staatsballett Berlin.

CityNews dance reviewers have been agog at news that this year Ukrainian/German artist Iana Salenko and her husband, Marian Walter, from the Staatsballett in Berlin will perform in B.I.G. alongside Daniil Simkin, from American Ballet Theatre, and Sharni Spencer, from the Australian Ballet.

With Tarabay’s business management background and Burke’s professional ballet savvy, they see their collaboration as a true “50-50” – “I learn a lot about business and Khalid learns a lot about ballet… Khalid has to get the music together and I have to deal with the contracts.”

Burke stresses that they are a for-profit company.

“We run commercially,” he says, adding that some state ballet institutions have hundreds of staff, whereas they sold 50,000 tickets in one season with just four very focused staff.

Burke’s connections helped him find the international stars that have put the stamp of quality on B.I.G. but also Instagram was his friend and some of his earliest dancers, such as Alexander Campbell, principal artist with the Royal Ballet, came to him that way. 

“We are getting the right mix of people,” he says. 

There’ll be little snippets of everyone’s favourite pieces of ballet, no matter where you’re coming from, you’ll get something.” 

Necessarily, because of touring, they’re using recorded music but there is a little live violin for the swan.

Audiences can expect the Dying Swan, a bit of Don Quixote Act and Le Corsaire, the Black Swan’s terrifying solo from Swan Lake and a new work about the artist Caravaggio that some people may find disturbing – “it’s a matter of taste”. 

One of the most controversial yet at the same time successful interventions into the ballet tradition is what he calls having “a bit of a rock band on stage”.

The performance concludes with its signature all-star finale, choreographed by Burke himself, where each artist competes with one another to the music of the rock band.

“We wanted to see if it would work with ballet dancers and it got the audience very excited.”

“But nothing beats classical ballet,” Burke asserts, and with that in mind, they will soon be staging the full-length Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet and, the real BIGGIE, Swan Lake itself.

The Ballet International Gala, Canberra Theatre, August 19.