An award-winning local author, poet and rapper, and a renowned American cellist come together to tell a story of environmental concern, self-destruction, belonging and family history in The Offering.

Bringing the multi-sensory show to his hometown of Queanbeyan, Omar Musa was inspired by his other home, Borneo, and his family’s Southeast Asian roots. Joining Mr Musa on stage is Mariel Roberts, a musical virtuoso who has crafted a soundtrack from found soundscapes and notes she has woven together to create a powerful musical narrative.

Excited to bring the experience home, CD caught up with Mr Musa ahead of the show.

Tell us about The Offering.

The Offering is a post-apocalyptic story about a nameless water spirit on a plastic ocean, searching for his memories and a place to call home. As he floats on the ocean, objects start to come to him, and slowly, through them, he regains his memory (about his family, Borneo, the environment and how the world ended) and his humanness.

Within the overarching narrative, I tell the story using different theatrical techniques, from rapping to spoken word poetry to something more akin to a historical presentation. Mariel Robertson single-handedly orchestrates the music behind it in a dynamic way; sometimes she uses field recordings from the jungle and reef in Borneo, sometimes she dips into more experimental cello music, at other times she uses Bornean gongs.

We wanted to make something immersive and original. We describe it as a “spoken word oratorio”, an oratorio being a large-scale narrative work to music, usually on a sacred theme, with that sacred theme in this case being the environment and memory.

Why is The Offering a story you wanted to tell? What was the inspiration behind it?

I wanted to tell a story that was grand and strange and delved into my heritage in Borneo. My previous one-man play, Since Ali Died, was very personal and focused on Australia, especially race, culture and religion. With The Offering, I wanted to turn my focus to Southeast Asia, and take personal material but turn it into something much more surreal and mythic, and focusing on environmental destruction and the unreliability of memory.

The inspiration behind it was a few exciting shows Mariel and I did in New York City, where our combination of music and poetry worked well, so we decided to take a few specific poems/stories from my book Killernova and build a whole narrative around them.

Why was it important to you to include oral histories inspired by your family?

The older I get, the more I am sure that there’s some spooky, unconscious influence of the storytelling heritage in my DNA that informs everything I do. I’m honouring my heritage every time I hit the stage, and it excites me and makes me feel whole to remix something very ancient.

Your recent woodcutting exhibition here in Canberra was inspired by the ecological crisis and pollution in Borneo, has it also influenced this piece?

This whole piece is about pollution, ecological crisis and climate change. This is me looking at it through fragments of memory and personal stories about Borneo, as a child and an adult, but hopefully, we comment in a way that is not didactic but emotional and vivid.

This is a work that is urgent and fiery but full of love and hope.

What role does Mariel Roberts play in telling this story?

Mariel is integral to the storytelling. Her brilliant compositions, playing and soundscapes tell the story just as vividly as the words, maybe even more so.

Working across a range of mediums, do they all offer a different means of storytelling?

Yes, they do, and I just use intuition to feel my way through when and where I use them.

There’s always something magical about the immediacy and riskiness of live performance, the ephemeral electricity that can occur with an audience when you do a show like this. Nothing like it.

What do you want audiences to take from The Offering?

I want them to be inspired, galvanised, moved and to see the world with new eyes.

Experience The Offering at The Q – Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre on Thursday 8 August 7:30pm; theq.net.au

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