The Offering by Omar Musa & Mariel Roberts. Presented by Q The Locals at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, August 8, 2024.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Performance Poetry – Omar Musa
Cello, live and recorded – Mariel Roberts
The Offering is a substantial work in a highly original form of a public meditation on how to become one with oneself; to be a whole person. Memory is essential, yet a key thought through the series of poems which make up this hour presentation is “memories are always translations” – of the past before one’s birth, as well as of your past since your birth.
Taking up stories of his immigrant father’s family and traditions in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, Omar speaks in role as a water spirit. He seeks understanding of the unity of land and water, searching in the archipelago of memories for the island which is himself – a Queanbeyan local, Australian, with memories of Borneo – its history as a country and the history of his family he has visited there as child and adult.
The often startling originality of his words, particularly when he tosses in unsuspected surprising rhymes, is matched by Mariel’s equally original creation of a soundscape – often perhaps in the tradition of musique concrète – live on the cello, but also incorporating instant recorded playback. She provides not just an accompaniment for the poems but a form of music in its own right giving an emotional depth to the images and moods in her husband’s words.
The poems come to seem like major arias in a small opera: the audience spontaneously applauded each poem, and one solo ‘poem’ from the cello without words. And, again surprisingly, the whole work becomes a drama with its hopes and dreams finally reaching the spirit’s success – as a fictional character which is also Omar Musa finding himself in a real world of human confusion.
Working together in the creation of art, Mariel Roberts and Omar Musa offer each of us the way towards our own one-ness. Breathe: inhale and search; exhale and find the way.
