The Offering

The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio) is the theatrical premiere of an epic new performance work by award-winning Bornean-Australian poet, author, rapper and a visual artist Omar Musa and American cellist Mariel Roberts Musa.

The Offering brings the arts together in a performance that is “deeply powerful and hauntingly poetic” – powerful because of the global significance of its themes, haunting because it is presented in a blend of words, music, rhythms and visual images that is poignantly moving.

Images that describe the ecological effects of man upon nature: the devastation that occurs when forests are cleared and waterways filled with chemicals and plastics. Words that mourn native flora destroyed, animals and people who have to adapt, or move on, or are lost.

Musa evokes these images in eloquent prose and poetry and the fast immediacy of rap accompanied by Roberts Musa’s deft fingers creating musical metaphors in the changing voices of the cello.

They tell of a displaced person travelling on a plastic ocean, his despair alleviated when he finds floating objects that evoke “an archipelago of memories” of places and loved ones. A blue plastic bucket conjures a memory of his grandfather carrying water in two buckets suspended from a pole on his shoulders. A piece of fabric evokes the flags of Borneo, flags that changed as the country was colonised again and again. “Memories are mistranslations” he reminds himself constantly.

The Offering is seventy minutes of changing words and rhythms framed by a wide screen of Musa’s deftly crafted woodcuts: choppy waves on a wide ocean; a mountain stream running through lush forests; a figure reaching for a lost world …

The Offering is seventy minutes that speaks for itself more eloquently than those who watch or hear it – or try to write about it! Musa is a brilliant wordsmith. Roberts Musa is a clever musician. Together they tell a story that is an “offering” of hope over despair that they will take to the world.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Phil Erbacher