In questioning how the Prime Meridian came to be - that imaginary line that governs how the world collectively orientates global time and space - Te Moana Meridian builds a case for why it is high time the United Nations considers relocating it from its current location in Greenwich, London to its antipodean coordinates in the open waters of Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean. A location as physically and metaphysically removed from the specters of colonial Western imperialism as possible, and toward an oceanic antidote to our current geopolitical afflictions. A place where the laws of nature - not humans - reigns. A place perfect for locating such an axis of global relationality as the Prime Meridian. Tethered as such to our shared and inalienable global commons - Te Moana Meridtian.

Created and directed by Sam Tam Ham (Sam Hamilton), the opera centers around two principal vocalists, Holland Andrews (NYC) and Mere Tokorahi Boynton (Aotearoa/New Zealand), and their delivery of the proposal as a striking operatic declaration, sung side-by-side in the antipodean languages of English and Māori. Meanwhile, below austere grids and rotating lines, an intergenerational choir renders their memories of the ocean into deep primordial liturgies while artist sidony o’neal, embodying the Prime Meridian, charts their collective vector through space and time. All together, through gentle but deliberate acts of human communion, Te Moana Meridian reframes how, at the system and geopolitical level, we might better relate to each other and the world around us with an M/O as bewitched, substantial, and life affirming as the ocean itself. 

To avoid drowning, become the ocean.