Each year, during the first weekend in May, communities across Aotearoa and around the world wake with the dawn to take part in Reveil, streaming live sounds of dawn in a rolling twenty-five-hour broadcast that follows daybreak westward around the Earth. This shared act of attention to the morning chorus has become a form of planetary listening that broadcasts across multiple radio stations across the planet. Listening and sensing in community casts embodied experience and community collaobration as a living practice and habit of getting to know a place and the creaturely voices and mechanical sounds that compose the hum of dawn. Listening to the full broadcast of multiple streaming sites becomes a way of remembering that time, as experienced here on Earth, is a collaboration between this planet and the celestial, and announced through a creaturely chorus of activity, worlds of sound that resonate quite differently under the same sun.

Why the Moon?
Whilst the Northern Hemisphere is moving into Spring, the South is shifting to Winter; yet, all places on earth share a sense of the full moon in the sky. In the Pacific and the Americas, the full Moon and early waning moon will remain visible after dawn across the weekend, lingering even as the sky brightens.

           To listen across the planet is to notice what is often drowned out: the quieter rhythms that connect many lifeworlds of a place under a shared sky.  The 2026 dawn listening takes place just after the full moon, in a month in which missions to the Moon are accelerating once again: NASA’s Artemis II and China’s Chang’e 7 are planned for 2026, with India’s Chandrayaan-4 expected soon after. Communities on Earth, whose cultural, ecological, and spiritual lives are deeply connected to the Moon, remain inadequately included in any of these plans.

           For many, the Moon and the dark skies are part of the integral lived experience of being alive, shaping seasonal rhythms, ceremony, and activities and relationship with place. Today, these skies are increasingly crowded with satellites and industrial activity. In Aotearoa, on the Māhia Peninsula, repeated Rocket Lab launches reverberate around the coast. While industry interests minimises the disruption that the communities are forced to carry. In this changing context, listening becomes a form of witnessing to power activism for the land and the skies. To listen together is to make these impacts known, and to affirm that they are neither negligible nor abstract: they are palpable.

To Participate

All streams come together during the first weekend of May, forming a continuous broadcast that follows the dawn chorus around the Earth just after the full moon.

          Over the summer months ahead, as communities slow down with the heat, drop-in workshops in Vanuatu and Haewai, Aotearoa weave together environmental listening, moon observation, storytelling, and poetry. These gatherings connect environmental sensing, art, and resilient communication technologies with a shared care for place, nurturing creative attention, resilience, and connection across islands in the lead-up to the Reveil weekend in May.

           In Haewai and Vanuatu, these community workshops work creatively with story and poetry, and practically with mesh networks, exploring ways to share poetry and environmental observations across a disaster-ready network while deepening local connection with the environment and climate.

          To join the Reveil weekend, participants are invited to register with Soundtent and set up a streaming site using the LocusCast platform (developed by Locus Sonus) by early April. Over the first months of the year, the organisers of Reveil, Soundtent, provide open online onboarding to help new participants prepare for the planetary broadcast in May. In Te Whanganui-a-Tara, our workshops can also support this onboarding process towards helping new streamers get started in Aotearoa, connecting streaming sites and streamers interested in listening together.

           These workshop activities nurture community involvement, environmental observation, climate awareness, and creative collaboration, supporting the work of Te Wānanga o Hina and the larger gathering in June.