The acting teachers, known mainly as The Head of Acting and The Head of Movement, seek out favorite students who are reinventions of their past selves. Stanley is an earnest first-year student looking for his niche and willing to do audacious things to shed his virginal skin and experience the adult and sophisticated world. As reality is eclipsed by truth, the core of human behaviors--shame, fear, love, hate, and ambition--are played out with glee and gloom on a stage of human experience. NZ Society of Authors Awards". Archived from the original on 17 August 2009 . Retrieved 18 August 2009. a b "Eleanor Catton has 'no particular great insights into politics', says John Key". The New Zealand Herald. 1 February 2015 . Retrieved 20 October 2017.

Catton, Eleanor (1985 - ) was born in Canada and raised in Canterbury. In 2007, she won the Sunday Star-Times short story competition, and in the same year she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, winning the Adam Prize in Creative Writing for her manuscript, The Rehearsal. Like me when I was at school, Julia also possesses that fear of being thought creepy by other girls at the same time as feeling annoyed by many and attracted to a few. The book, though, does have some of the sort of generalisations about female group behaviour which I only ever hear of in fiction by women writers. (My school was a bit odd and devoid of all manner of things good and bad which other people I've since known experienced at school. Our year never really gelled, said the teachers, which may be the reason for certain absent social features. Plus the most of the women I'm good friends with in more than a basic social networking sense tend, like me, not to be fans of hanging out in big all-female groups.) But despite all the occasional things that for me missed the mark, The Rehearsal captures very well the suffocating experience of being a teenage girl in a single sex school when you just don't see most things the way the others do. So Catton has written a coming of age novel, which is primarily about sexuality and The Theater, and focuses on the symbolism of jazz saxophones. You'll note that, despite all this, I really liked this book. The two stories flow inexorably towards a common destination, a performance, a recital, when perspectives combine, and yin and yang embrace, at which point the novel becomes most Proustian in its concerns: "I could only ever tell you how I remember it, never how it was." Alternating with the girls’ story is a narrative concerning first year Drama Institute students: "Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal...It isn’t a perfect copy of real life. It’s just a point of access...things are made present."Catton met Chicago-born poet Steven Toussaint at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Toussaint moved to New Zealand in 2011 to begin a PhD in US avant-garde poetry at Victoria University of Wellington. [6] [37] The couple later lived in Mount Eden with their two cats (Laura Palmer and Isis) while Catton taught creative writing part-time at the Manukau Institute of Technology. [6] [19] Catton describes Toussaint as the first reader of her drafts, and he prevailed in an argument over whether one character in The Luminaries should be killed off. [37] They married on 3 January 2016. [37] [38] [39] [40] As of 2023 [update] the couple live in Cambridge, England with their daughter. [26] Philanthropy [ edit ] Heaney, Catherine (25 July 2009). "An exciting new arrival". Irish Times . Retrieved 22 February 2021. I didn’t want to write a book where nothing happened,” she says. “Where the book participated in any sort of apathy or nihilism by just kind of shrugging its shoulders and saying: ‘Well, actually, nothing is going to change, the writing is on the wall already.’ I wanted the book to show that actions do matter.”

Catton made zombie movies with her friends as a teenager and participated in the 48Hours film challenge, but never studied screenwriting. [20] Mrs Henderson. At present your daughter is simply too young. Let me put it this way: a film of soured breast milk clutches at your daughter like a shroud....Meanwhile on another part of the grounds where the sax teacher has her studio is a prestigious acting institute that some kid named Stanley is trying to earn a place. Nyff Announces Retrospective Selections Inspired By Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘My Journey Through French Cinema’ – Exclusive It's a dual-narrative story, and the interweaving stories are crafted SO well. It's seamless. You could tell what was coming but it wasn't boring, it just built the anticipation more. Performance and artifice are, the novel seems to suggest, everywhere. It would be neat and tidy to view one narrative strand as the heightened, theatrical representation, and the other as ‘real’ reality; but The Rehearsal doesn’t permit such a simplistic reading. The drama teachers seem as outlandish in their own way as the saxophone teacher; and Stanley’s father (who suggested that his son could get rich by taking out a life insurance policy on the child at school most likely to die) feels no more ‘real’ to me than all the interchangeable mothers who are content to let the saxophone teacher insult them and their daughters. The students choose the juicy story from next door: the affair between Victoria and Mr. Saladin (with Stanley only figuring out much too late that Isolde is Victoria's sister).

In 2014, Catton delivered the annual Read NZ Pānui (then the Book Council Lecture) at the 2014 New Zealand Festival Writers Week, 'On Craft: Paradox and Change.' At times Catton seems to be trying -- and juggling -- too much, but for the most part she manages to keep everything impressively in the air. Eleanor Catton on Orange Prize long list". Stuff.co.nz. NZPA. 17 March 2010 . Retrieved 29 September 2011. Much like the moment in pool when the cue ball breaks up the carefully assembled triangle, this encounter between Mira and Lemoine ends up affecting every other character in the book, even those who have no reason to know one another. The choices they make, to use and to be used, reverberate in ways you might expect only if the image of the five crushed landslide victims lingers as you read. All of the book’s major players get a chance to turn the tide of events in their favor. Shelley Noakes, Mira’s best friend and roommate, is stealthily seeking a way out of the collective, tired of playing the steady foil to her more volatile friend. The Darvishes—Sir Owen and his wife, Lady Darvish—view Lemoine’s incredible wealth with a mixture of disgust, awe, and desire, even as they conduct business with him. And, finally, there’s Tony Gallo, Rosie’s love interest, Mira’s ex- something, and a former member of Birnam Wood, who, in a paroxysm of barely sublimated sexual jealousy, has decided to write an exposé of Lemoine, and in so doing stumbles upon Lemoine’s mining operation. I require of all my students," says the saxophone teacher who acts as audience and foil for her pupils' passions throughout, "that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom ... If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong." The mother to whom she's speaking, meanwhile, responds with social platitudes quite at odds with the teacher's fierce poetic rhythms.Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted signal I can think of making you see. The narratives develop in different tenses, one past, the other present. Catton messes around with time, sometimes telling us the effect, before we learn the cause. It works, though, because we learn by accretion as we accumulate "the weight of these small things," each of them elegantly and eloquently composed. Catton was born in Canada in 1985, [2] where her father was a graduate student completing his doctorate at the University of Western Ontario on a Commonwealth scholarship. [3] Her mother Judith is a New Zealander from Canterbury, while her father, philosopher Philip Catton, comes from Washington State. [4] Her family returned to New Zealand when she was six years old, and Catton grew up in Christchurch. Her mother was a children's librarian at the time, and the family had no TV; Catton was an avid reader and writer from an early age. [5] In a blog post responding to the affair, Catton commented that her reported remarks were a condensed part of a larger interview, and she was puzzled why her comment at the Jaipur festival had generated such controversy: "I’ve been speaking freely to foreign journalists ever since I was first published overseas, and have criticised the Key government, neo-liberal values, and our culture of anti-intellectualism many times." [34] She continued:

Guardian first book award". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. 28 November 2009 . Retrieved 19 September 2013.

There are another half-dozen characters, mainly young actors, who get a few good scenes each, yet never coalesce into memorable persons. It's hard to tell whether the film is too bighearted to ruthlessly narrow its focus or if it was a much longer film that got cut down, losing emotional connective tissue. Whatever the explanation, "The Rehearsal" is a sensitive, thoughtful, often provocative movie that nevertheless feels like a missed opportunity. The movie is at its best when it's sitting in class watching the students work through material and their issues. In fact these sorts of scenes are so consistently strong (particularly when Fox's coach is alternately cheering and goading them) that I wouldn't have minded a more abstract, conceptual movie set entirely in the classroom. You have to wonder whether their expectations might include a little scandal. They push their daughters from clarinet to saxophone, because it's a "sexier" instrument. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you.