The Offering

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The multi-award winning Australian author, poet, and rapper Omar Musa, and the internationally renowned American cellist and composer Mariel Roberts bring a dramatic seafaring monologue to the stage with The Offering. The stirring music, poetry, and theatre performance is rooted in the tradition of oral histories and explores themes of environmental damage, belonging, and boundlessness, using Omar’s family history in Southeast Asia as inspiration. The show combines storytelling, poetry, hip-hop, and live music with sound recordings made in the forests and ocean off the island of Borneo in the Malay Archipelago. 

In The Offering, a protagonist from a country torn apart by ecological collapse and climate change travels across a plastic ocean towards a mythical volcano where he seeks destruction by self-immolation, but instead finds revelation and a vision of a world without borders.

Omar Musa has published three books of poetry, a novel, four hip-hop albums, and the acclaimed one-man play Since Ali Died. Musa’s work of poetry and woodcuts, Killernova, won the Special Book Award at the ACT Notable Book Awards, was longlisted for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and received an honourable mention for ACT Book of The Year. His debut novel, Here Come the Dogs, won the People’s Choice Award at the ACT Book of Year Awards, was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award and the Miles Franklin Award, and Musa was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year. He won the People’s Choice Award at the ACT Book of Year Awards and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and the South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.

Mariel Roberts is not only known for her musical virtuosity. Her artistic work combines avant-garde, contemporary, classical, improvised, and traditional music, and her performances are bursting with “unbearable intensity” (The Whole Note). Roberts has performed as a soloist and chamber musician on four continents, most notably as a member and co-leader of the Wet Ink Ensemble (recognised by the New York Times as ‘Best Classical Ensemble of 2018’), as well as with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Bang on a Can All Stars and Ensemble Signal. Roberts has released three solo albums featuring her own material.

Rapper, poet, author and visual artist, Musa is arguably one of the most exciting creators in Australia right now.

The New York TImes Style Magazine: Australia