[SOLO] Marc Labrèche

VSIt was an epiphany. A punch. I didn’t want to be an actor anymore.

I was very young, around 21 or 22, when I suddenly realized this. I was working a lot at the time, by chance and by circumstances. There wasn’t a large pool of young actors who could play teen and young adult roles; there must have been four or five of us in town sharing all the work.

My father, Gaétan, was himself an actor. I found that following the same path lacked originality and punch. I wasn’t sure that I was really doing this job by choice. My dream was to become a lawyer or a journalist. I had even started studying philosophy, which I left to do theatre.

In the early 1980s, I did the musical Houndstooth for two and a half years. It was excessively demanding, exhausting. I came out of it almost depressed. This is where I decided to drop everything.

I told my girlfriend that I needed to leave, to see what was happening elsewhere, to feel useful even if it was on a microscopic scale. The most difficult thing was not to leave the profession, but to leave her here, even if she had agreed to wait for me.

It’s part of my temperament: as long as I want to turn things upside down, I like to do it completely, to go after my desires. I have always felt this call to jump. Afterwards, I can see if I did well to throw myself into the void.

I found a small agency, somehow, that was supporting children with leprosy in India and was looking for volunteers who wanted to get involved there. It was exactly the kind of commitment I was looking for. I sold my records and my guitar, bought a plane ticket and left.

Marc Labrèche in the teletheatre The taste of living, by Yves Thériault, in 1978

Photo: Radio-Canada

L’ashram where I was staying was at the foot of the mountains. As soon as I arrived, I was supervised by a fabulous group of two people who told me what to do, while they read poems by Tagore and did meditation while contemplating the Himalayas.

I was trampling. I still came here to do something! I started from my own initiative with my bag full of peanuts and vitamin C tablets to distribute to children who absolutely did not want them. One morning, being particularly enraged and determined, I arrived in the mist, like Lance Armstrong during a stage lap, in a village where there were 8 sheet metal houses. Feeling invested with a mission, I rummaged in my bag, offering my peanuts with a big smile. Everyone ran off. I don’t think they had ever seen a white man.

It was a total flop.

Soon after, I realized that the organization I was involved with was taking Polaroids of kids on the street and sending it to Montreal saying, here’s the kid you’re sponsoring, send us $10 a month. I told them they were finished crossers and left.

I ended up arriving in Rishikesh, a holy city. Something very spiritual transpires from this place where the Ganges flows between the mountains. Even the Beatles had been there, which gave me the strange feeling of finding a landmark there. I decided to settle there.

One day, while walking down the street, I was attracted by beautiful music emanating from a house. As I poked my head in the doorway, I saw a woman playing an instrument I had never seen. Next to her, a man waved me in.

Can I take courses in this? which I said, pointing to the instrument, a bass drum with strings.

The man replied yes. I started the next morning.

I spent the next three months living a monastic life. I got up, I ate (always the same thing), I went to my music class to try to master this instrument called the swarmandal, I then played it for an hour or two, I wrote letters and I was going to bed. I really wanted to learn this music, which I never understood, in the end.

I worked, a lot, and I missed my girlfriend, a lot.

A man looks at the camera.

Marc Labrèche at 18, a few years before his departure for India.

Photo: Radio-Canada

That’s what I was looking for, I guess. I needed to stop and lose myself in something that was the opposite of hustle and bustle. It’s not like I’ve been into dope or partying before, but I wanted to get to a point where a hint of what I really want in life would appear. And for that, I had to uproot myself. I felt like I had to choose who I was again, other than being the son of .

At some point, I had to come back to Quebec. Except that my only desire was to return to India. That was my revelation: my life, it was there.

Worse? my girlfriend asked me on my return.

How to tell you? I have to go back which I answered.

Are you fooling me?

No, I have to go back.

No that’s not true. First of all, you’re green as a bitch and skinny as a cat’s bone. What are you going to do there?

I don’t know, I just need to go back.

I probably won’t wait for you.

I say.

I don’t know what I sold, another guitar, maybe. I bought a new ticket. When I set foot on the plane, I had my real revelation.

Oh my God, Mark. You are thick. You were mistaken. You don’t want to leave the woman you love. What are you doing there?

As soon as I arrived, I started doing everything to come back. First, I had to go back to see my teacher, who wanted to give me his daughter in marriage, to decline his offer. It’s funny to think that if I wanted to, I really could have made my life there.

After a month in Delhi, waiting for the Air India office to finally open during a lull in the unrest at the time between Hindus and Muslims, I managed to get my hands on a ticket. Every day I told myself that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

But when I returned, a miracle happened. My girlfriend was there, open to try to pick up the broken pots.

I didn’t know it yet, but she would become the mother of my two wonderful children, the woman with whom I would spend 22 years of my life.

A river flows past buildings with tree-covered hills in the background.

The Ganges flows through the city of Rishikesh, India. On the right, the Tera Manzil temple.

Photo: gettyimages/istockphoto/Marina Krisenko

EEven today, I still don’t have definitive answers that explain why I made this trip, and what effects it had in my life.

When Fabienne got pregnant, a few years after my return, I decided to call back the people I knew in the theater world, to earn some money. Except that in 3-4 years, the circles had closed. I started again as I should have: I did some extras, I landed minor roles and I forged new ties. This break allowed me to make my own path, the one that resembles me and belongs to me more than the road traced by my father, which I had taken by default.

Maybe I had to deprogram myself to see how I could include this job, or any job, in my life without it defining me. I loved my dad, but the game was his life. His friendships, his loves… everything started and ended in the profession. Maybe that’s what scared me. I didn’t want it to eat me like it ate my dad.

I don’t come from a large family that stayed together for a long time. Sometimes I tell myself that this adventure also made me want to believe that I could get involved with someone and start a family, even if at the start it wasn’t really on my mind. check list. The devotion that I was in a hurry to demonstrate elsewhere, I realized that I could, without claiming to be a saint, transfer it to my loved ones and contribute to their lives.

It gave me another mission, that of getting involved in the world where I am. And that’s a lot more accessible than mastering the swarmandal and it’s better to work on than going to the other side of the world to invent a life of Jesus for myself.


[SOLO] Marc Labrèche – The trip where everything was decided | Arts | Radio-Canada.ca