About "GEORGE"

ABOUT THE CREATOR

Léa des Garets (she/they) : Writer and performer

Léa des Garets is an actor, writer, theatre-maker and translator from Bordeaux, France.

After an English degree at the ENS and two years lecturing French at Cambridge University, Léa started a career in the performing arts with Night Train Theatre Company, starting at the Edinburgh Fringe and touring in the UK and in Ukraine. In 2022, she was one of the 10 mentees selected for Projekt Europa’s Empower mentorship programme, which supports and champions migrant theatre talent in the UK.

Her work aims to give more visibility to hidden voices from the past and the present, focussing particularly on international voices, female-led narratives and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Now based in London, Léa works across stage, screen and voice studios between France and the UK. 

"We reinvented George Sand. I rediscovered her a couple of years ago: I knew about that woman who wore men's clothes and had lovers of all genders and seemed to live freely... and yet I hadn't heard or read nearly as much about her as I did about her male contemporaries! I spent months reading about her, diving into her novels, her autobiography, her correspondance, her plays... I found a soul sister, two centuries apart! Along the way, I found Gabriel, which compiled everything that fascinated me about George Sand: her ground-breaking interrogations on gender, on women's education, on inequality, on sexuality... and I was fascinated by her relationship with Marie Dorval. "The inseparables", people called them. In the correspondence we have today, there are a few years missing. And there isn't much around her time in Marseille and her writing Gabriel... So I thought: what if we could reimagine what happened then?"