About
Dr Heleen du Plessis is an inspiring and passionate cellist, educator, researcher, producer of creative performance projects, and artistic director whose career spans more than four decades across South Africa, New Zealand, Europe, and the United States.
Her work explores performance, learning, teaching, identity, belonging, and human connection through music.
Alongside her performing and teaching career, she has developed a particular interest in movement, performers’ health, and the prevention and recovery of performance-related injuries.
In her role as Associate Professor of Performance at the University of Otago, she teaches cello and has developed courses in chamber music, music performance pedagogy, and performance health and wellbeing.
Beyond her work as performer, teacher, and researcher, Heleen is deeply committed to building musical communities and creating opportunities for others.
She plays an active role in fostering artistic collaboration, youth development, and community engagement.
She is Principal Cellist of the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra, Director of Cellists of Otago, a founding member of the organising committee of the Dunedin Concerto Competition, and coordinator of the Dunedin Youth Chamber Music Festival.
Performance
The hallmark of du Plessis’ delivery is an earnest emotive string colour traversing a glorious pathway direct from the heart to the fingers.
Otago Daily Times
Her playing held the capacity audience in rapt attention, constantly challenging her instrument to produce the tiniest whispers of sound with contrasting dazzling cadenzas.
Bay Chronicle
Equally at home as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and principal cellist, she combines expressive musicianship with a commitment to collaboration, artistic exploration, and contemporary creative work alongside the established repertoire.
Her playing has been praised for its technical command, artistic insight, lyricism, expressive depth, richness of sound.
Collaborating with distinguished performers, composers, and conductors, fellow musicians and critics often remark on her rare musical synergy with fellow performers.
Du Plessis produced magical sound contrasts and meaningful phrasing, with incredibly accurate technical control, fully enlightening the contents of the work.
Beeld
Demonstrating an enthralling, natural synergy that exists between their two instruments.
Sun Live Bay News
Chamber Music of the highest standard.
River City Press
Heleen du Plessis, one of New Zealand’s top cellists was in fine form, totally immersed in the music and at one with her beautiful instrument. The interplay between the cello and marimba was magical.
Wanaka Sun
The two performers showed impressive understanding, weaving their instruments together.
The Star
Exquisite lyricism ,glorious sonority and impeccable intonation, holding the audience enthralled.
Otago Daily Times
Creative Projects
Alongside her performance career, Heleen has developed a distinctive body of creative work exploring identity, belonging, place, and human connection through music.
Through interdisciplinary, multi-media collaborations with composers and artists from South Africa and New Zealand, she has commissioned, performed, recorded, and produced new works that investigate who we are in relation to where we come from, where we belong, and how music can connect people across cultures, landscapes, and communities.
Major projects include Cello for Africa, Cellists Aotearoa, and Tahu-nui-ā-Rangi. Together they trace a journey from connection to roots and heritage, to belonging in a new homeland, and ultimately to a broader sense of connection with the natural world and shared human experience.
Her recording Cello for Africa was nominated for the International Listener’s Choice Awards and praised as “a genuine attempt to build a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue” that “embodies] the highest standard of artistry.”
Through projects such as Cello for Africa, Cellists Aotearoa, and Tahu-nui-ā-Rangi, performance becomes not only artistic expression, but also a means of inquiry, connection, and cultural exchange.
Teaching
Heleen is Associate Professor of Performance at the University of Otago, where she teaches cello and has developed courses in chamber music, music performance pedagogy, and performance health and wellbeing.
She works with musicians from childhood through to adulthood, supporting both youth development and continuing education. Her teaching extends beyond instrumental instruction to the development of the physical, mental, and artistic skills that underpin healthy, expressive, and sustainable performance.
Music and education shape who we become.
Her teaching is guided by the belief that music and education serve a wider purpose: helping people discover their potential, overcome challenges, and continue growing throughout life. Whether teaching performance, pedagogy, or movement, she seeks to nurture confidence, independence, resilience, and artistic identity.
Students frequently describe her teaching as inspiring, transformative, and life-enhancing.
“With the cello as her medium, she has given me lessons for life.”
“One of the best teachers I have ever had.”
“Most engaging and caring.”
“A bottomless pit of inspiration.”
Research and MMMM
For more than a decade, Heleen has investigated the relationships between music, movement, muscles, and the mind, seeking to understand the underlying causes of performance-related tension, pain, and injury.
Drawing on movement science, learning theory, pedagogy, performance practice, rehabilitation, and surface electromyography (SEMG), she developed the Mind–Muscles–Movement–Music (MMMM) framework to help musicians develop greater awareness, freedom, confidence, and long-term sustainability in performance.
She brings together the physical, technical, cultural, and scientific in the most compassionate way.
Cello student
As a trained SEMG practitioner, she has applied this technology in both rehabilitation and teaching, helping students and professional musicians improve movement efficiency, reduce pain, and develop greater physical awareness and control.
Heleen has an in-depth understanding of the connection between the mind and the body and how this connection transcends to making music for the musician. She is masterful with musculoskeletal assessment and analysis of muscle functioning, specifically for musicians. She has become an expert in surface electromyography with a no-nonsense scientific approach that gets results.
Rowan Ellis: Accredited Exercise Physiologist, Director and founder of MR EMG
Read more here and the dedicated knowledge hub.
The Story of My Cello
The cello, has taken her on many journeys of discovery and connected her with many people and places, is not just any cello – it is an instrument with a special story of its own, which sparked her love and passion for cello and provided a lifelong source of inspiration.
Born into a musical family in the picturesque town of Stellenbosch, South Africa, I began cello lessons at a young age with British cellist Julian Hart at the University of Cape Town. Although Afrikaans was my first language and Julian’s was English, we shared a special connection through music that transcended language.
When Julian died unexpectedly, I was devastated and vowed never to play the cello again. At his funeral, however, his parents approached my father and told him that after reading Julian’s diary entries about me, they had decided to gift his cello to me.
Since the age of ten, I have played this French cello, built in the early 1900s. The instrument carries a remarkable journey of its own—from Europe to Africa and later New Zealand—and has accompanied me through every stage of my musical life. In many ways, it connects past and present, carrying both history and memory within its voice.
How Fair this Spot by Rachmaninoff with Terence Dennis, piano
Rachmaninoff Vocalise with Terence Dennis, piano
Lilburn Canzona arranged for solo cello and string orchestra by Anthony Ritchie, recorded at the University of Otago 150th celebrations, 2019