Join us on a journey with Omar and Mariel

May 5, 2025

A message from Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa

We’re incredibly excited to be collaborating with National Theatre of Parramatta on The Offering (A Plastic Ocean Oratorio). We hope that it is something totally new – an impossible to categorise meeting point of theatre, oral history, classical music, hip hop, and sound art. We want to immerse the audience in an ocean of sound and imagery – to trek with them through the jungles of Borneo and have treetop conversations with orangutans; to sit side by side at grandmothers’ kitchen tables and rap poetry; to swim with them way down to the ocean floor and explore the history of South-East Asia, then sail across the sea towards a fiery volcano and the possibility of a new world.

Mariel weaves cello with the intricate sounds of the Bornean rainforest and the reef, while Omar tells stories about a world aflame, flags, turtle eggs, complicity and the borderlessness of dance.

The Offering will give audiences the feeling that they’ve stepped out of their lives for 75 minutes and have been transported into another world. We want to create a space not only for deep connection with sound and language, but for reflection on our position and responsibilities in this world. We can’t wait to share this deeply personal work with Parramatta, and we hope audiences love it as much as we enjoy performing it.

– Omar Musa and Mariel Roberts Musa