The ocean is often seen as a barrier, as something that separates “here” from “there,” but “Huki,” the multi-cultural “lagoon show” that officially opened at the Polynesian Cultural Center on Saturday, puts things in reverse perspective.

The message “Huki” shares is that the ocean unites island cultures of the Pacific rather than dividing and separating them. With that as the overriding theme, a cast of more than 90 dancers, singers, musicians and canoe-wranglers celebrates six Pacific island cultures – those of Fiji, Hawaii, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Samoa, Tahiti and Tonga – and shares an overview of their history from the explorers of antiquity to the present day.

While the most immediate appeal of the show is the pageantry created by groups of dancers in brightly colored costumes performing on canoes and rafts, the show gives visitors and malihini (newcomers) the opportunity to learn something they can bring home with them.

For instance, and before the first watercraft comes into view, the audience is divided up into six sections. Each is then taught the basic greeting of one of the six cultures — “aloha” for Hawaii, “talofa” for Samoa, and so on. There’s also a brief demonstration of the basic hula motions for the show’s final song.

A segment involving Maui is an early highlight. The famed demigod is certainly much better known outside Polynesia since the international success of Disney’s “Moana” in 2016 and “Huki” has an appropriately muscular Maui who uses his magic fishhook to “huki” (pull) the islands of the Pacific up from the ocean floor; Maui also pantomimes his capture of the sun and his acquisition of fire.

Armed conflicts between Pacific island peoples are part of the narrative — there are times in the show when people in the front row may get splashed with water — but the overriding message that “This ocean is our highway, it unites us as one” is brought back into focus with a marriage that unites Tonga and Samoa.

In another interesting and entertaining number, “Huki” shows how Pacific peoples have adopted and adapted musical instruments — the guitar, the ukulele, the acoustic “stand-up bass,” bass guitar, steel guitar and the instrument known as the “Tahitian banjo” — and brought them into their own cultures.

Western concepts of choral singing became Polynesian as islanders embraced Christianity, while some pop songs became so popular that they were translated into Maori or Samoan even as “The Hawaiian War Chant,” originally a typically explicit Hawaiian love song, was sweeping the world as a wacky hapa-haole novelty hit.

Visitors — and residents under a certain age — may not know that another hapa-haole standard, “The Hukilau Song,” sometimes known as “Going to a Hukilau,” was written about an old-time hukilau at La‘ie that began in 1940 as a fundraiser to rebuild a local church. The fundraiser was so successful it became a commercial visitor attraction. Cast members demonstrate how the fishermen of old would “throw our nets out into the sea” and then “huki” them to shore — full of fish where “the laulau is the kaukau at the big luau.”

As years passed and visitor expectations changed, the success of the La‘ie hukilau inspired the development of the Polynesian Cultural Center in 1963.

“Huki” ends with the opportunity — there’s no pressure — to do the basic hula motions that were demonstrated earlier as the canoe-borne performers pass by in revue for the final time.

Bottom line? PCC’s “Huki” is a colorful introduction to Polynesia, and a far less strenuous experience than standing in the ocean and helping huki in a net full of fish at a hukilau.