In the final weekend of OzAsia Festival, the two-person act The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio) offered Adelaide audiences a striking performance of ecological urgency and intimate storytelling. Writer / poet-performer Omar Musa and cellist-composer Mariel Roberts (together with production designer D. Andrew Potvin) delivered a work that is both poetic and defiant, a voyage across plastic seas and generational memory.

From the get-go, Musa captivated with his lyrical words, accompanied by the cello’s low rumble and projected art, also designed by Musa, in the backdrop which all combined to create a dream world. The central figure is a water-spirit adrift on a vast plastic ocean, searching across time for lost relations, lost land, lost memory. Through the water spirit, the stories roam across family storylines, the weight of displacement in Borneo, the impact of colonialism, and amongst it lively activistic hip-hop.

Musa has gravitas, a true poet at heart with an impressive vocabulary to boot. A moment recounted with an orangutan in the Bornean jungle was particularly touching. Roberts’ cello work was equally as impressive. It was active and instinctual, using the strings and a looping machine to create layered soundscapes that could be fierce or soothing, and always matching Musa’s spoken word.

Musa draws on family references, roots, displacement. Roberts brings classical intensity and experimentality. Together they invited the audience into the deep underbelly of our collective consumption, with plastic blue buckets and ice-cream containers reappearing within the storytelling as a symbol of environmental waste in our precious oceans and land. The projection design and lighting evoked imagery of Musa’s hometown of Borneo, but also of the ocean waves and the jungle.

There were moments when the layering between the cello and Musa’s words became intense, but the piece never lost its emotional clarity. In the final sequence, as Musa asked the audience to breathe in and out with him rhythmically like the ebb and flow of the ocean, if you closed your eyes the cello sounds mimicked that of the gentle ocean waves lapping at the shore.

For Adelaide festivalgoers in search of something that merges poetry, classically trained strings and a message of environmental urgency, then The Offering is a compelling find. In the intimacy of Nexus Arts, the message from Musa was clear. We need to listen to what we are doing to the world. A deserving highlight of OzAsia this year.

Catch The Offering and the final performances of OzAsia this weekend. Check out the program here.