Sam Hamilton
Chinook land, Portland, OR
Te Moana Meridian
World Premiere
Co-presented with Boom Arts and Portland Art Museum
Tickets available through Portland Art Museum
Creative Director, Producer, Composer, Author, Choreographer: Sam Hamilton (he/they), USA / Aotearoa New Zealand
Producer / Manager: Carlee Smith (she/her), USA
Principal Vocalist / Māori: Mere Tokorahi Boynton (she/her), Ngāi Tūhoe, Aotearoa New Zealand
Principal Vocalist / English: Holland Andrews (they/them), USA
Performer / Thinking Finger: sidony o’neal (they/them), USA
Choir Director/Manager / Performer: Crystal Meneses (she/her), USA
Costume Designer: Clara Chon (she/her), USA, Aotearoa New Zealand
Production Manager: Jeff Forbes (he/him), USA
Sound Engineer/Operator: Ash Sturgin (she/her), USA
Te reo Māori Translator: Rhonda Tibble (she/her), Aotearoa New Zealand
International Producing Consultant: Fenn Gordon (she/her), Aotearoa New Zealand
Access notes: ASL interpretation available upon request.
DESCRIPTION
Looking to the future, we know our current systems are failing us. But how do we change direction when our most basic means of understanding time and space is one of those failing systems?
The London borough of Greenwich was appointed as the international prime meridian in 1884 at a conference in Washington, D.C. to calibrate the world's time zones. Its establishment, which was imbued with romantic cosmopolitan idealism, relied upon a presumption that there should be a single authoritative “center of the world,” from which universal time and space may be measured. With this designation came immense geopolitical privileges that have consequently shaped how humanity ideologically perceives—and thus governs—the world. While location is purely arbitrary to technical usage, it ultimately determines whether the prime meridian acts as a “beacon in service to all humanity,” as its progenitors stated, or a metaphysical means to codify the hegemonic ambitions of a Western empire. Just as all the roads that once led to Rome consecrated its imperial power, all coordinates today point to London.
Te Moana Meridian proposes the election of a new “center of the world,” one of genuinely equal value to all humanity and liberated from the failing trappings of the past and present. The question is where. Te Moana Meridian finds an answer in the open waters of Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean. At the exact antipodean coordinates of Greenwich, this expanse of sea is the current prime meridian’s opposite, both geographically and metaphorically. It is a site anchored to and defined by the global commons and the ocean itself: interconnected, omnipresent, transient, life-affirming. Further, moving the prime meridian from the West would signal a meaningful recognition of the ocean as a “common heritage of all humanity”—as proclaimed in 1958 by the UN in the Convention on the Law of the Sea—instead adopting a system for global longitude that champions human relationality and all that unites us, rather than divides us.
To avoid drowning, become the ocean
The opera piece of Te Moana Meridian is an experimental creative vessel for delivering its speculative UN policy proposal to the world. The text occupies the role of the opera’s central libretto, sung side-by-side by Holland Andrews (a featured artist of the 2024 Whitney Biennial) and esteemed Māori performing artist Mere Tokorahi Boynton (Ngā Toi Māori Director of the New Zealand Arts Festival) in the antipodean languages of English and te reo Māori.
In contrast to the libretto’s critical heaviness, the performance unfolds through slow, transcendental tidal phases. While Andrews and Boynton render the text into a sublime yet authoritative incantation of global reckoning, an intergenerational choir slowly circumambulates around them, singing deep primordial liturgies of aquatic possession. Meanwhile, acclaimed contemporary artist, performer, and mathematician sidony o’neal shepherds the collective passage through the sung duration. As gentle but deliberate acts of human communion weave their way through austere grids and lines, Te Moana Meridian comes to embody a relational potential as bewitched and substantial as the ocean itself.
As an opera, Te Moana Meridian aesthetically sits somewhere between Léo Delibes' famous Lakmé “Flower Duet” and the anarcho-feminist moxie of 80s British punk band CRASS, with plenty of influence from the humble yet life-affirming luminance of Yoshi Wada's “Earth Horns,” and all things Éliane Radigue. Other benchmarks include Agnes Denes’ gentle yet city-humbling Wheatfields of Manhattan, Iannis Xenakis' monolithic Persepolis, the pregnant voids of Ralph Hōtere's paintings; and the soft power of Yoko Ono's Wish Tree.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sam Hamilton (Sam Tam Ham) is an independent, working class, interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, OR. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton's practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement. What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel(s) best serve the idea at hand.
The long song
a meandering garden path
Both an entrance and an exit
Hamilton's work has existed in a wide range of contexts, including Converge 45, Portland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Portland Art Museum, OR; Transmediale, Berlin; Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival; Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland; as well as a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens, Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dude’s apartment in Lima, Peru, and on the radio.
In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa New Zealand, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru, including ten years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAB; Ruhrtriennale, Ruhr; KVS; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Théâtre de la Ville, Paris; and more.
Their work has been recognized with a Creative Capital Award, Oregon Community Foundation's Creative Heights Award, and an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award, among others.
SPONSORSHIP
Produced with support from Creative Capital, Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights initiative, Portland Art Museum, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, PICA, Boom Arts, and the Bodecker Foundation.