After opening at the Joyce Theater on 16 September, Sonya Tayeh’s dance-theatre ode plays the Balboa Theatre in November as part of ArtPower’s 23rd season; Dorian Wood’s piano-and-voice reading of the 1990 album follows in April 2027.
Sonya Tayeh’s dance-theatre work The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor is due at the Balboa Theatre in San Diego in November 2026. Co-commissioned by ArtPower, the piece forms part of the company’s 23rd season and follows a New York opening that has already taken place.
The work opened at the Joyce Theater on 16 September 2026. It draws on O’Connor’s music and excerpts from her memoir for a poetic, non-biographical examination of grief, joy, rage and spiritual seeking following her death in 2023. The choreography stems directly from Tayeh’s response to that loss.
Students at UC San Diego can attend a workshop and the San Diego performance free of charge. A further tribute is planned for 22 April 2027, when Dorian Wood performs O’Connor’s album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in a piano-and-voice reading.
From The Lion and the Cobra outwards
Sinéad O’Connor was an Irish singer, songwriter and activist, born Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor and later also known as Shuhada’ Sadaqat. Her debut studio album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released in 1987 and achieved international chart success. The follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, arrived in 1990 and became her biggest commercial success, selling over seven million copies worldwide. Its lead single, “Nothing Compares 2 U”, was honoured as the top world single of the year at the Billboard Music Awards.
That 1990 record remains the centre of gravity for many listeners and for the April 2027 San Diego reading. Later work included Am I Not Your Girl? in 1992 and a long run of further releases, collaborations and remasters that stretched into the 2020s, among them a thirtieth-anniversary remaster of “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 2020. The catalogue never settled into a single mode; the voice stayed recognisable across styles, from the early albums through later singles and collaborative tracks, including work with Damien Dempsey.
For an audience that still hears those records daily, the interest in The Surge is practical as well as commemorative. The piece does not attempt a biography. By placing the songs and the memoir fragments inside a dance-theatre frame, Tayeh treats the emotional and spiritual weather of the catalogue rather than the sequence of a life. Grief, joy, rage and spiritual seeking are held as forces in the room, not as chapters to be illustrated.
After New York, towards April
The Joyce Theater run put the work in front of a New York dance audience in mid-September. The San Diego engagement keeps it in circulation and ties it to ArtPower’s season and to free student access for both workshop and performance. That pathway is part of how the co-commission reaches a local public beyond the ticketed night.
Dorian Wood’s concert on 22 April 2027 then turns the focus back onto the 1990 album, reduced to piano and voice. Where Tayeh works through the wider field of O’Connor’s music, Wood isolates the record that first carried her to a mass audience. Together the two dates mark a sustained local attention to a body of work that ended with O’Connor’s death in 2023 and that continues to be heard, interpreted and staged.
The Surge does not claim to settle anything about the singer’s life or public stances. It is an ode in the strict sense: a made response, in another art form, to music that still lands with force. November at the Balboa Theatre is one such hearing; the piano-and-voice night in April is another. What remains after 2023 is the catalogue — and the willingness of artists in other forms to keep listening to it.
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