A production based on the life and music of Sinéad O’Connor is set to open in Manchester this summer – check out all the details below.
Titled The Surge: An Ode to Sinead O’Connor, the new dance production comes from director and choreographer Sonya Tayeh (Moulin Rouge! The Musical). Described as a “meditation on voice, protest and the courage to live a life that defies the norm”, the show will feature O’Connor’s music, as well as spoken excerpts from her 2021 memoir, Rememberings.
“Sinead has been a part of my life since her first album arrived blaring out car windows in Detroit, where I’m from,” Tayeh said (via Crack). “All of those memories came flooding back when she passed.
“I was heartbroken. I then had this sudden vision of 10 women standing in a straight line at the edge of a stage and I was hearing (her song) ‘Troy’ in my ears. That’s when I knew this was the next art quest and Sinead is the path.”
The Tony-winning choreographer plans to tell the story of the O’Connor’s life using dancers, whose “collective presence challenges conventional ideas of ageing in dance”.
“Just playing Sinead’s music in a dance studio does something to the psyche,” she added. “It feels as though she’s saying, ‘Here’s where you pour it all out and see what’s left’. Joy and grief, strength and sorrow, faith and family, integrity and self-righteousness.
“Sinead is such an in-depth storyteller, such a poet, both in song and in text. To me, Sinead O’Connor’s music is rooted in a sense of a desire for freedom, an unrelenting righteousness and a quest for a spiritual awakening,” she added. “The depth of emotion in her music is unmatched.”
The premiere sits within Factory International’s spring 2026 programme at Aviva Studios, and the will debut on June 25 in Manchester’s The Hall – and you can find your tickets here.
News of the show follows last year’s reports that a biopic about O’Connor was in development, rumours of which date back to 2023. In August, Variety claimed that the project has been in the works since 2022’s Nothing Compares documentary and would recall the life and career of the late artist.
“It will look to tell the story of how one young woman from Dublin took on the world, examining how her global fame may have been built on her talent, but her name became synonymous with her efforts to draw attention to the crimes committed by the Catholic Church and the Irish state,” it claimed.
The latter refers to how O’Connor was a passionate activist, and frequently used her platform to call out sexism in the music industry and corruption in the Catholic Church. In 1992, she famously used her slot on Saturday Night Live to tear up a photograph of Pope John Paul II during her performance.
The Irish singer passed away on July 26 2023, aged 56. Her cause of death was later revealed to be asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). She was laid to rest at a ceremony in the Irish town of Bray last August, with Bob Geldof and Bono among those paying tribute at her funeral.
Many figures from the music industry paid tribute to her online, including Garbage, Billy Corgan, Michael Stipe, Fall Out Boy, Ice-T and Tori Amos, and streams of her music went up by 7.9million in the US during the week after her death.
Her biggest hit was her cover of Prince‘s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, and she also won a Grammy for her second album ‘I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got’, which she released when she was just 23. Other accolades included O’Connor becoming the first woman to win an MTV Video Of The Year award.
The post Stage show about life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor opening in Manchester this summer appeared first on NME.
via Nich Productions
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