OzAsia Festival. Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa. Nexus Arts. 6 Nov 2025

 

The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio) is as powerfully modern event, as its form has roots in ancient arts of mythic, poetic storytelling shared by cultures western and Asian.

 

Renowned Queanbeyan essayist, poet, visual artist, novelist and rapper Omar Musa and globally renowned cellist (and Omar’s wife) Mariel Roberts Musa, deliver a profoundly searing biographical tale of Musa’s family origins in Borneo in a manner that is cutting, unapologetically upfront, shocking yet profound as readers of Homer’s Illyiad would have taken it in its time.

 

Musa’s savagely beautiful story goes beyond individual human stories to encompass the wider one of ecological destruction, colonial capitalism, and enforced poverty as a consequence of industrial development.

 

He is the water sprite seeking to become human again. The sprite encountering the pollution of the seas. The young man observing his Grandparent’s jungle livelihood being obliterated. Considering Musa’s own life as an immigrant to Queensland.

 

Musa’s writing is beautiful, yet hard in its succinct symbolism without a drop of sentimentality in it. He delivers it with an authority of an ancient storyteller who is yet, so very young. The work is so carefully paced, assisted by the most beautiful projected back drops of sea, and of jungle.

 

Roberts Musa’s composition for cello blended with electronics and effects is stunning in the range of emotion, place, and experience it expresses, from human breathing to the violence of the sea and volcano. You will never hear like of it from any other cellist.

 

Musa’s use of rap is easily the most seismic element of the production’s impact on the audience. It hits so hard, these vicious yet accurate words of truth telling, exposing environmental destruction, human displacement, economic abuse.

 

This work is indeed an offering, of hope in a future beyond the travails of the present. An understanding of a historical reality—as Musa noted to the audience, “bet you didn’t think you’d be getting a history lesson.” A reckoning with what a pathway to something better might be.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 6 and 7 Nov

Where: Nexus Arts Centre

Bookings: Closed