THE SURGE: AN ODE SINÉAD O'CONNOR by Sonya Tayeh is Coming to The Joyce Theater
Performances will run in The Joyce Theater’s Tino & Rajika Puri Auditorium.
The Joyce Theater Foundation will present the North American premiere of The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor, a new dance work conceived, choreographed, and directed by Tony Award-winning artist Sonya Tayeh, from September 16–27 in The Joyce Theater’s Tino & Rajika Puri Auditorium, opening The Joyce’s 2026–27 season.
A Joyce Theater Production co-produced by Factory International, The Surgewill have its world premiere later this month at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, in Manchester. Inspired by the uncompromising spirit and music of Sinéad O’Connor, the work is an electrifying meditation on voice, protest, rebellion, vulnerability, and the courage to live beyond convention.
The North America premiere of The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor launches The Joyce Theater’s Fall/Winter 2026–27 season.
Fierce, unflinching, and deeply human, The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor channels the raw emotional force, restless spirituality, and radical honesty that made O’Connor one of the most singular artistic voices of her generation. Created, choreographed, and directed by Tony Award-winner Sonya Tayeh and performed by an all-female company of ten extraordinary dance artists spanning several decades in age and more than five hundred years of collective lived experience, the work becomes a powerful meditation on voice, protest, womanhood, vulnerability, resilience, and the courage to live beyond convention. Set to O’Connor’s iconic music and featuring narration drawn from her memoir Rememberings, The Surge rejects cultural ideas surrounding aging as something to diminish or conceal. Instead, Sonya Tayeh places female experience, history, physicality, power, and emotional truth at the center of the stage, creating an evening that pulses with urgency, grief, tenderness, rage, sensuality, and ecstatic release.
With The Surge, Tayeh turns her attention toward the legacy of Sinéad O’Connor, an artist whose voice and defiance reverberated far beyond music. O’Connor’s fearless commitment to truth, her refusal to conform, and the aching emotional immediacy of her work become both foundation and catalyst for an evening of mesmerizing dance that moves between vulnerability and defiance, intimacy and rebellion, ultimately celebrating the freedom found in living authentically.
The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor features music by Sinéad O’Connor; lighting and scenic design by Tom Visser; sound design by Marc Cardarelli; associate choreography by Jenn Freeman; costume design by Márion Talán de la Rosa; associate costume design by Mieka van der Ploeg; and rehearsal direction by Jenn Freeman and Lauren Gerrie.
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