Back in December, a coworker mentioned to me that students can get discounted tickets to the theater. I went online to find out more, and discovered that while $15 student deals existed, there was something even better…
Columbus GoFor5
The Columbus Go For $5 ticket discount program lets people ages 13 to 25 get $5 tickets to select performances from various arts organizations around Columbus, from ballet to the chamber orchestra to the symphony.
I have always been into theater—I have seen at least a dozen Broadway plays—but I have never gotten to watch much ballet in person, despite taking ballet as a child for about six years. I decided to use the GoFor5 program to my advantage and succeeded in snagging tickets to three of the 2018–2019 ballet performances by BalletMet.
BalletMet The professional BalletMet company was officially formed in 1978, four years after Daryl Kamer began the BalletMet academy in 1974. Since BalletMet’s move to a 35,000 square-foot dance campus in downtown Columbus in 1990, BalletMet now ranks among the nation’s 20 largest professional ballet companies. The 2018–2019 season of BalletMet featured five ballets. Of these five, I got tickets to three of them. Many BalletMet performances take place in the Ohio Theater. |
The Nutcracker is a holiday tradition for BalletMet—they have performed the ballet every December since their inception.
Because The Nutcracker was my first ballet at BalletMet, I learned the hard way that you can pick up tickets two hours before the performance, but you cannot enter the theater until an hour beforehand. Standing outside for an hour during December is not a very fun experience. Luckily, the ballet itself definitely was!
The second ballet I saw in March was Don Quixote. I have heard all the jokes about jousting with windmills, but I have never read the full story. So, I was excited to see this ballet in person.
Overall, Don Quixote was my favorite of the three ballets this year. The only downside for me was when I returned home that night. I dropped my pamphlet in the snow when getting off the bus and then spent countless minutes with a hair dryer attempting to save it. I succeeded, but the program is definitely the worse for wear.
The third ballet, by Liang, was actually a set of three short ballets created by BalletMet’s artistic director Edwaard Liang.
Each of the three ballets were done in a different ballet style. The first, Symphonic Dances, was classical. The second, Beautiful Child, was contemporary. The third, Wunderland, was neoclassical (a mixture of classical and contemporary). While Symphonic Dances and Wunderland have been around before—they premiered in 2012 and 2009, respectively—this year was the world premiere of Beautiful Child.
Of these three ballets, I enjoyed Beautiful Child the most. They used a smoke projector to cover the stage like a mist-filled lake, and I found it provided a creative visual as the dancers disappeared and reappeared into and out of the smoke.
The ballet that disappointed me was Wunderland. The program claims Liang was inspired by a snow globe when creating this ballet, but the murky red-and-beige color scheme did not bring that to my mind at all. To clarify, the ballet itself was okay, but not what I was looking for in regard to a snow-globe-inspired dance.