Washington Square News
4
CULTURE@NYUNEWS.COM
MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2020
CULTURE
Edited by BELLA GIL
Focus on Your Home Work With Tips From These Commuters By ANNA CUCIUREAN-ZAPAN Contributing Writer Who in a million years thought they would be reading an article on how to successfully transition to a semester at home taking online classes? Not me!
You’re probably even reading this while avoiding said online classes. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about how you can make your remote semester the best it can be. We’re here to help, along with advice from our fellow classmates who have some experience
working from home. Liberal Studies sophomore Tomás Rios grew used to his New Jersey-to-Manhattan train rides and developed the work routine he needed to keep up with his Economics courses.
ALEXANDRA CHAN | WSN
A student sets up their study area on a desk back home. Since the COVID-19 crisis has sent many students away, some commuters offer advice on the experience of working from home.
One of the best ways Rios studies at home is by sitting down and grinding out reading and studying by using what’s called the “Pomodoro Technique,” a time management system created by Francesco Cirillo. The system says to work for four half-hour intervals with five minute breaks in between each one, until finally taking a longer 15-30 minute break. But aside from completing schoolwork, what are some crucial parts to having a productive day? “Working out in the morning and talking to at least one friend during the day helps my sanity,” Rios said. Balancing your work life and social life is now more important than ever, so if you realize you haven’t spoken to anyone except your dog in a couple days, try to Facetime one of your fellow social distancing friends. CAS first-year Patrycja Lis quickly learned what time management means as a student athlete here at NYU. Traveling back and forth from Queens while attending both classes and track practices meant long days for Lis. She’s more of a morning person, and hates having any work left after her night classes. Lis advises to do schoolwork during the day if you can, so that you have the time after dinner to relax instead of cramming in an essay before midnight. Something we can all do is create a more solidified morning routine,
which is exactly what Lis does, now that she has three free hours of her day that used to be spent on the subway. “I wake up at the same time every day so my sleep schedule doesn’t get messed up,” Lis said. “And now I have time to make breakfast so I’ve been better about eating more scheduled meals, because I’m not running around everywhere.” A lot of what the news and social media are now pushing is productivity. Tweets have been circulating, reminding us with an unkind nudge that Shakespeare wrote King Lear under quarantine and that Sir Isaac Newton discovered calculus under the same circumstances. But in reality, it’s hard to be cooped up in one place for so long. We’re all still students, and we’re all still facing the ramifications of this pandemic. None of us can deny how isolating this whole remote semester is. You may not feel like organizing your closet or reading a book; you may just want to stay in bed all day, and that’s okay. It’s more than okay, especially in such a panic-inducing and surreal time like this. Take care of one another and check in with your friends and family. Take the time you need to feel at peace — or at least semi-okay — with everything that’s happening, and then get to becoming the next Rembrandt. Email Anna Cuciurean-Zapan at culture@nyunews.com.
Gallatin Senior Defies Gravity and Expectations By ELIF KESIKBAS Staff Writer College life is like walking on a tightrope: balance is everything. While many students are trying to find the perfect balance between their academics, social lives and career paths in the circus of university life, Gallatin School of Individualized Study senior Ingrid Amelia Apgar defies gravity and expectations as a circus artist at Circus Warehouse. Apgar started her journey in circus arts with the trapeze classes she took at Trapeze School New York in Boston. Immediately drawn to the excitement of aerial arts, she expanded her skills with a silks course in Santa Monica. Apgar then fully immersed herself in aerial arts with a series of summers at French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts’ summer camp, where she went from being a beginner-level aerial arts student to getting hired as an instructor teaching/coaching 100 campers. However, her professional career as a circus arts performer kicked off when she met Suzi Winson. “I met the woman who owns the Circus Warehouse in Queens, and her name is Suzi Winston [sic],” Apgar said. “And she was like, ‘If you are family to these guys, you are family to me; come do flying trapeze!’” Since June 2018, Apgar has been a part of the professional program at Circus Warehouse in Long Island City under the mentorship of Suzi Winson. While Apgar is now a part of the adrenaline-filled atmosphere of the
circus arts, she started her performance arts career with ballet when she was two-and-a-half years old. “So they [Apgar’s parents] took me to class and maybe the first few classes, I refused to get off of their lap,” Apgar said. “So I would just sit on their lap and watch the class. And then after class was over and the teacher was gone and all the kids out, I would run up to the ballet bar and try to imitate what I had seen and dance myself.” Even though Apgar spent the first few classes sitting on her parents’ lap, she embarked on a 15-year-long journey in ballet that would shape her as a performance artist and inspire her studies at Gallatin. During her high school years, she started easing out of ballet and building an interest in aerial acts. At the same time, Apgar joined a dance program at her school, where she explored “what she thought dance was” and how “choreography related to the embodied sense of movement,” which allowed her to encourage herself to break out of the strictly classical regimen of ballet. “Since I grew up in ballet, I grew up with a very specific idea of what dance was and what choreography was worth watching on stage or putting on stage,” Apgar said. “In high school I had a very postmodern dance program, but I didn’t have the term ‘postmodern’ to describe it, necessarily.” When beginning her studies at Gallatin, Apgar had the opportunity to build the theoretical tools to put her high school experience into a linguistic and psychological framework,
which then inspired her concentration “Fragile Bodies, Transient Matters.” Using her concentration, Apgar challenges the relationship between “spaces in the body and spaces that the body can construct in the context of performance,” and explores the ways that technological entities affect performances. She dives deeper into the topics of theoretical physics, how spaces define different things and radioactivity. “So the idea of a very small amount of entropy and decay, it all sort of comes together in nuclearity as an idea,” Apgar said. Just as her career in performance arts have influenced her studies, her studies have influenced her stage presence. Apgar directed “Of Our Bodies” in May 2019 for the Dancers/Choreographers Alliance at NYU, in which she concentrated on improvised movements onstage. In addition to the performance side of the arts, Apgar is also interested in their technical components. Apgar works as an audio-visual technician at the Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts, where she stage and house manages the events held all year round. She also works part-time at Secret Loft, where she stage-manages the biweekly shows “Secret Circus” and “Street Meat” at nights. You can catch Apgar stage managing at Secret Loft or performing every month at Circus Warehouse — once social life resumes! YECHIEL MICHAEL HUSARSKY
Email Elif Kesikbas at culture@nyunews.com.
Gallatin senior Ingrid Amelia Apgar is a circus artist training and performing at Circus Warehouse of NYC. Apgar shapes her studies around movement and physics, and works as a technician at the Labowitz theatre, taking interest in all aspects of her performing art.