The Offering

Reading Omar Musa’s bio will not prepare you for the transporting experience of his performance art piece The Offering. The only real clue is that the Queanbeyan local Musa seems to have a restless creativity, inspiring him to create poetry, novels, four hip-hop albums and latterly woodcut prints. The Offering is hard to fit to any one genre, which is equally the contribution of his partner on stage and new wife, avant garde virtuoso cellist and composer Mariel Roberts Musa. The Offering combines elements of classical music, story-telling, poetry and rap to create a dreamscape exploring the subjectivity of memory—part history lesson, part lament for past and future loss, part wry commentary.

To begin with, Musa invites the audience to breathe in and out to a count, slow and steady, so that their breathing itself becomes part of the soundscape. This is almost a meditation. Musa takes the audience to mentally tour his father’s homeland of Borneo, to meet fishermen, villagers, an orangutan, a grandfather shouldering two buckets on a rod, and a grandmother who despite never learning to read or write composed hundreds of rhyming poems and committed them to memory. We see flashes of the island, the forest, a volcano, a fishing village, and the ghost of a drowned man in a sea of plastic waste, painted in words to make images that flit between realistic, metaphorical, allegorical and affectionate.

Mariel’s music is integral to the creation of these mood pictures. Wearing no shoes and gripping her cello with her bare knees, she seems to use her instruments as an extension of herself. She uses many novel techniques concurrently, plucking the strings at the same time as bowing, sometimes bouncing the bow rapidly to form a scratchy insect-like vibration, or laying down a recorded loop. The resulting music is startling and beautiful. The opening piece is calming with long, slow chords that resonate through your body. “To Burning” is urgent, percussive and with building emotion. “Fire on the Hills” puts Musa’s hip hop vocals over a melodic tuned drums and a sustained notes reminiscent of a call to prayer.

It was absolutely wonderful to see this versatile couple play in Musa’s hometown Queanbeyan. I hope they return soon.

Cathy Bannister

Photographers: Ralf Puder (top) and Nana Franck (lower 2 images)/