Marcus Youssef's new short film Dust delivers a message from our dystopian future
The playwright tackles climate catastrophe, data surveillance, and more in an intense seven minutes
Omari Newton delivers an impassioned warning in Dust.
Playwright Marcus Youssef originally wrote Dust for a live theatre performance, but quickly saw how well it lent itself to pandemic-era streaming.
Neworld Theatre, VIFF, The Arctic Cycle, and Progress Lab 1422 copresent Dust via VIFF Connect at 2 pm on March 27, followed by a live talk with Marcus Youssef and Chantal Bilodeau; the film streams until April 22
IN A GLITCHED-OUT transmission from the future, a man delivers a warning. It’s 2170, and climate change has killed billions. “South of the Equator: floods. North? The heat.” But humankind has come up with a solution to the devastation, and—if we understand his garbled message correctly—it could rival the dystopian universes of anything in Soylent Green, Brazil, or Mad Max.
The rogue “Person of Privilege” delivering the message is actually Vancouver actor Omari Newton. And his intense solo performance is part of the taut and blackly satirical new seven-minute film Dust, written by well-known local playwright Marcus Youssef. (See the trailer below.)
The work began as a short play, commissioned by Boca Del Lupo from the Neworld Theatre senior artist, who later rewrote it for the 2019 Climate Change Theatre Action. But then the world blew up, and Dust ended up taking the form of a short film, with filmmaker Cameron Anderson and Neworld director Chelsea Haberlin joining forces at the helm. The result of that six-month process finally debuts for free this week via VIFF Connect.
The idea of presenting the play in its digital form made immediate sense to Youssef—and not just because theatres were shuttered due to the pandemic. “It started occurring to me that it might lend itself to being experienced through a screen, because it is a piece that is written, even when performed live, as a transmission from another time,” he tells Stir from Montreal, where he’s teaching.
Dust may only last a riveting seven minutes, but it draws on some complex ideas—the political, the social, and the deeply flawed human. He cites his initial inspiration as The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s in-depth sociological analysis of our digital era—one that looks at how powerful global tech companies have enticed us to give up our privacy, then used that data to control our behaviour, and erode democracy. “It’s an unbelievably rigorous analysis of the way technology and capitalism intersect to produce what she argues is comparable to the industrial revolution,” Youssef explains, “except now the natural resources are us—we are the most mine-able, harvestable natural resource in the history of humanity.”
Data surveillance seems to run rampant in Dust’s dystopian future—a fact that helps explain the character’s tendency to check over his shoulder and whisper some of his secrets to us.
Dust contrasts a lot of the more earnest or lecturing messaging we receive about the climate catastrophe and what we need to do to prevent it. And this will come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the Siminovitch Prize-winning playwright’s work onstage, whether it’s been the sly game of beliefs-interrogation that was Winners and Losers or the dark satire of The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil—not to mention the warped socio-political parodies in some recent East Van Pantos.
“I just don’t think people respond well to being told what to think,” he asserts. “I think people respond better to things that surprise them or that provoke questions that aren’t easily answerable.
“When I think about the climate catastrophe, nothing about that’s easy,” he adds. “We all know that, and so something that reflects that complexity is something I’m always chasing—not always succeeding, but always chasing.”
In Dust, then, Newton’s character tries to warn us about our impending doom, but you’ll have a lot of questions about the fear and “immense crushing sadness” that he’s expressing. We won’t give away the production’s secrets here. But it’s important to note that when Youssef saw the first cut of the film, he knew it had to be more interrupted, fragmented, and garbled when it was translated to the screen.
“I was like, ‘Oh, it's just all much too clear,’” he recounts. “That worked in the live-performance version, because the audience was with the actor and there was a different kind of reaction. But in screen land, I gave suggestions for chopping things up more, so we’re not always getting the explanation for what this world is, and we have to do more work to kind of stay with it. That really, for me, elevated the piece to a more interesting place. Now the audience is more in a place where they have to put things together.”
The idea of interrupting the message was also influenced by an unfortunate, but in hindsight helpful, incident wherein someone hacked into one of Youssef’s early-pandemic Zoom readings of Dust, broadcast by the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
And here, we’ll defer to Youssef himself, as he describes in full what happened in the early days of livestream experimentation over the interweb.
“I was just reading it, I was performing it, as I do, and this stupid, dweeb, 20-year-old-whatever-internet-junkie started, like, swearing and then pumping porn into the feed,” he recalls. “But in this world it actually kind of made sense! Like, if you’re thinking of the detritus of the internet coming at us from the future, you can only imagine that a lot of porn would be part of it. And I remember, as it was occurring, I kind of played with it for a while. And then it came to a point where I had to go ‘Okay everybody: I need you to know that this is not part of the script,’ because a lot didn't know. And in the chat on the side [of the Zoom screen], somebody said, ‘Everybody: Marcus just said that the porn is not part of the script!’ So that was pretty funny.”
To be clear: there is no porn in Dust. But the incident speaks directly to all that is royally screwed up about the colossal flow of information, and who holds the power, as humans connect online—and what that could mean for our collective future, including the fate of Earth itself.
Faced with an existential threat, people seem to somehow have migrated entirely to that virtual space in Dust. Youssef says expressing that fragmented world reminds him of a book he’s reading right now: Patricia Lockwood’s poetry-prose novel No One Is Talking About This, whose protagonist is famous for posting on the internet. “It’s the first piece of literature that approximates what it feels like to live inside the internet and it’s extraordinary. And it [the internet] really is that hyper-fragmented cacophony of things that are utterly banal and deeply meaningful and transgressive and horrifying and intimate—and all a rolling cascade of that stuff,” he says, acknowledging that there is also an addictive allure to the internet—whether it’s mining our most personal data or not. “I’m interested personally, and always have been, in the way we find ourselves complicit in systems that we don't necessarily agree with, because I think that's actually a fundamental experience of being human.
“That was what was interesting to me about the character, in the position that he is in,” he says, referring to Newton’s messenger in Dust, and the way he both colludes with and warns about the “solutions” to climate change in the future.
As you probably have guessed by now, Dust has a lot to say in its tight and tense minutes. For his part, Youssef has enjoyed writing short for online in these pandemic times. “I’m getting better at it; there's been so much of it during the pandemic, I’ve never had so many short commissions,” he says. “Five or 10 minutes seems to be the right amount of time for something online because of people's attention spans onscreen. And I understand that! I have a hard time digesting much performance onscreen… At all, frankly.”
So while Dust is being presented virtually, and Youssef had a great time making it with his colleagues, don’t expect him to make this “pandemic pivot” to film a permanent career shift. If the piece has a larger message, it may be that our world is better off when it operates outside of virtual space.
“At this time I feel more called to fight for the idea of liveness and our physical relationships to one another—and the way our bodies speak to each other when we are in each other's presence—than even before, because of the kinds of issues that are at the centre of Dust,” he emphasizes. “We are in a disaster-capitalism sort of moment where the economy and technological forces are profiting from the pandemic and our move to online. Relationships are being turbo-charged in a way that none of us could have imagined.
“I’m interested in liveness: what occurs when we are together in rooms, whether that's creative rooms, collaborative rooms, or rooms where we’re performing and exchanging our actual physical presence with audiences,” he adds. “That’s what I do and that's what I'm most interested in. I think this has been a great time for artists who are already invested in this idea of digital in performance or the performance as digital. I’m not that person. I really just am not.”
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