Many teenagers today prefer snuggling between Nickleback-blaring headphones and swooning at the latest Johnny Depp film over visiting local folk art museums or underground poetry readings. Still, millions of teens love the art but cannot afford tickets to truly enriching events. High 5 Tickets to the Arts supplies a solution! By providing students with access to affordable tickets to top-notch dance, music, theatre, and visual art events, High 5 encourages teens to appreciate and participate in the arts. Multi-culturally savvy and ignorant students alike enjoy the benefits of this organization created specifically for 13 to 18 year olds.

Since its start in 1993, High 5 has sold over 100,000 tickets. In less than 15 years the non-profit organization has garnered praise (and monetary donations) from The Carnegie Corporation of New York, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Times Company Foundation, and numerous other respectable corporations and individuals. Arts & Business Council of New York recently awarded Ada Ciniglio, the executive producer of High 5, with an Encore award for inspiring new, art audiences. What makes High 5 so spectacular? Everything from their diverse activity options to their easily accessible website, http://www.high5tix.org.

High 5’s webpage offers everything teens need to access the arts. At the site students can easily search the organization’s database for upcoming happenings. Most tickets cost a measly five dollars. Still, High 5 sometimes grants group rates, and students may always obtain museum passes for the low price of $2.50. Parents and teachers will appreciate High 5’s website’s considerate warnings that inform audiences of the potentiality of objectionable adult content. Also, High 5’s website features an educational account of the organization’s history.

Based in New York City, High 5 offers teens the absolute best of the “capital of the world.” Ballets, “indie” film festivals, improvisational acting sessions, classical music concerts, and comedy acts flood the group’s calendar. Events at prestigious venues like Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater, Carnegie Hall, and the Emerging Artists Theatre inspire exertion in young musicians, actors, dancers, and class clowns. Teens can also purchase day passes to museums. Thirteen to eighteen year old artisans will appreciate inexpensive trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which features pieces by famed artists such as post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, and the Museum of Modern Art, an extra avant-garde institution that showcases works by cult classics Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock.

When we lived in Queens, New York, my family and I frequented the events posted on High 5’s website. Though my three brothers and I sometimes grumbled and complained about sitting through long classical music concerts in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, we tried to cherish our enviable opportunity to enjoy such novelties. After enduring a number of presentations by the New York Philharmonic and other esteemed performers, my love for classical arts (and especially the robust style of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák) bloomed. My mp3 player began to reflect my tour of classical music, pop culture’s bedrock and foundation. High 5 also provided my family with free tickets to an underground, trial performance by Blue Man Group. To this day, my older brother’s jaw drops when he recalls the technicality and precision of the percussionists, and my two younger brothers exclaim over the humorous gestures of the silent, blue-faced performers.

Poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” High 5 Tickets to the Arts’ efforts truly work to develop creative individuals from today’s teenagers. By offering easy access to the arts, High 5 inspires teens to explore talents they never knew they possessed. Though reveling in the latest mainstream radio hit has its place, most teenagers need to take a step outside of their comfort zones and explore new artistic territories. Undoubtedly, High 5 Tickets to the Arts helps teens do just that.