Meet Matthew Helms

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matthew Helms a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Matthew , looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

I think it stems from being raised old school….i grew up a country boy from a family with great morals and beliefs, of earning the right to come home because a good day’s work had been put in. I was homeschooled as a kid and was in martial arts and acting in movies since age 4 and was always around adults so being around that professional and adult scenario allowed me to have a more mature outlook as a kid

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Little Backstory:
Since the age of 3 years old i was a Martial Artist all the way up to present time. In that time i was a multiple time full contact fighting champion, a current 5th degree black belt in our system, 5 Gold medals in the Rocky Mountain State Games, 4 Gold medals in the State Games of America, Taekwondo Junior Olympic Gold medal winner for Colorado, and a member of the Black Belt Hall of fame at age 9. I was a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at 9 years old and my family and I came from a country way of life, farm home, animals and livestock and rodeos. So, when i decided that i wanted something different than the normal childhood, my mother decided to homeschool me and from that i was teaching Karate classes at 10 years old and my Instructor and my Grandmaster owed a stunt college in Pensacola FL so after school and in between Dojo I would go to stunt classes and acting classes for the next 5 years. I was hired on as a child in commercials, movies, and modeling… featured in projects like…
: The Patriot with Mel Gibson, The Black Knight with Martin Lawrence, and Cabin Fever directed by Eli Roth

Fast Forwarding, my instructor advised that as a short kid at 15 years old I should be enrolled in a class that had more flexibility. It would help if I started to grow into my body and my mother enrolled me into a ballet class, needless to say at first i was against the idea but on my own i could see the next chapter in my life… teaching Martial Arts and running a dojo but i have a strong philosophy of climbing, conquering, achieving of staying hungry and i knew starting very late in ballet i would need to buckle down if i wanted to be a professional. So, at age 15 I was offered full scholarships to a Russian ballet school and won a full scholarship to Ballet West company in Salt Lake City UT. Turning professional in just 5 years and work as a guest dancer in multiple states in companies as I still do to this day and have been a professional ballet dancer for the last 15 years.

Professional career has been a principal dancer with Boulder Ballet for 13 years and fulltime teacher and dancer all around the U.S. The vision now working with BalletNEXT is to grow more as an artist with Michele Wiles as her dance partner and grow this organization and to share it worldwide

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Commitment
2. Consistency
3. Confidence

to be open to new possibilities… know that we are all unique and have our own certainties that define us and we are all born original and don’t live as a copy or a number

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

always looking for the next challenge ….
whether it’s working with new choreographers, dancers etc. Hopefully expand my teaching to dancers to learn to weight train for ballet, to partner with more film and production companies to expand BalletNEXT all over the globe and reach these places and grown the brand and our support from all over

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @strongballetman