Sonya Tayeh Reflects on Aging, Spirituality, and Grief With The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor

Sonya Tayeh Reflects on Aging, Spirituality, and Grief With The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor Sonya Tayeh is well-known for her award-winning Broadway and commercial dance credits, which include “So You Think You Can Dance,” Moulin Rouge! The Musical, and the recent musical adaptation of Black Swan. For the past year, she has been developing a project that’s especially close to her heart: an evening-length dance work set to the music and writing of Sinéad O’Connor, featuring an ensemble of dancers over the age of 40. The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor had its premiere at Manchester, England’s Factory International in June, and comes to New York City’s Joyce Theater September 16–27. The work offers intimate portraits of each performer within a visceral collective expression, all channeled through the delicacy and fury of O’Connor’s unmistakable voice. What inspired this project? I’ve been a huge admirer of Sinéad since I was a kid. She was the rebel queen and has maintained that stamp in my heart. When she passed, I was in a deep grief space. And in that time I was also curious where the dancers my age or older were, because in my sphere I don’t see them as much as I’d like to. So I was in my grief, blaring her records, and I was thinking, I want to dance to all of these songs that truly changed me when I was younger and heightened my sensibility to not be sensible—to live a loud, true life. So I said, “Let’s put these things together: Sinéad O’Connor’s music with women 40 and up.” How did you go about selecting songs and working with excerpts from O’Connor’s memoir, Rememberings? You have those albums that you play all your life, and that’s Sinéad O’Connor for me. I truly love them all. And there were guides and signals along the way. I heard “In This Heart” at a coffee shop one day, and another day “Troy” was playing when I turned on my TV. So some would cosmically come, and others I just knew I needed to dance to. I find that there’s so much richness in the variations of sound. She was so ahead of the game, so sincere in who she wanted to be and how she wanted to be heard. Her music is like a live diary. And then I listened to her audiobook 10 times. It’s one of the most beautiful books of poetry about a life lived. I knew I wanted to open the piece hearing her first—it’s her voice narrating. I tried to take more abstract things that connected me to the themes we were building on, so that it wouldn’t be my interpretation of Sinéad’s life. What were some of those guiding questions and themes? I feel there were these ongoing questions as I aged of what’s painted on me and what is mine. What are the social constructs that have been put on my body? What forms are mine? What do I want to keep, and what do I want to get rid of? With these 10 women that have over 500 years of collective wisdom and experience, those questions just hit differently. There are three themes driving this work: spirituality, grief, and identity, and how they all interconnect with each other. Sinéad was just so overwhelmed by her spirituality, and so curious about it. She sounds prophetic; there’s so much cathedral energy and epicness in her music. And within grief there are such beautiful juxtapositional feelings between joy and rage—they suit each other, they need each other. There’s a braiding together that I want to find, as opposed to trying to unravel or separate them. I want to feel them together. When she said “I never signed anything that said I would be a good girl” or “I’m a protest singer, I never wanted to be a pop star,” I feel that in me. As artists we go through this identity crisis by way of forced perspective, which I find infuriating. And that’s what I find I can relate to in her, and so can the dancers: They’re scholars, they’re teachers, they’re dance artists who are ready to do anything, but their options are made smaller as they grow in age. And I want that to stop. And the only way to do that is to keep doing this. What has surprised you most in this process? I’ve never had so many women [after hearing about the work] say to me “I wish I was 40. I can’t wait till I’m 40.” I find that so amazing. I wish for that for us. I’m not saying it’s this beautifully perfect thing, but I really hope I grow older. I want to live for as long as I can, and I want to move my body and treat it as sacred. If I hope for anything, I hope that I can reach those dancers who need to know that it’s possible.