'The Surge' review: Sinéad O'Connor honored through dance

The death of Sinéad O’Connor in 2023 stirred a range of emotions in choreographer Sonya Tayeh.

“Seeing her have such depth and yearning in her storytelling for her life made me remember that’s what true art-making is,” Tayeh writes in the program notes of The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor, which has its U.S. premiere at The Joyce. Co-produced by Factory International, the work allowed Tayeh to process her grief over an artist who shaped her youth, offering a collage of emotions that tracks the central themes of the late singer-songwriter’s music, including protest, the cost of authenticity, feminine rage, and self-love.

Rhythms that give, take, and grieve

The Surge evolves around four church pews. Dancers sit and hang their heads over the back edge as their limbs slip and spill to O’Connor’s “Just Like U Said It Would B.” Soon, they push the pews away like boats into the ocean. They flip upside down and land sporadically around the stage. Lighting and scenic designer Tom Visser further transforms the environment, utilizing the pews to guide the ensemble from inside a church and into a hazy memory full of collision.

Tayeh’s tight choreography still allows room for the dancers to infuse their own artistic expression, such as when the ensemble reaches a symbolic protest, and their unified phrases transform into a frustrated toss or shake of the arms.

Gabby Malone and Lisa Race in "The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad of O'Connor." — Gabby Malone and Lisa Race in “The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad of O’Connor.” Photo by Manuel Harlan.

For the most part, a well-established tempo drives the 70-minute piece forward; dancers ooze from a haunting, slow step to a quick staccato race. But then the choreography loses its urgency in a loop of monotonous swaying, as if the dancers are shuffling for a place to land.

With a right hand over the heart (not unlike the final moments of Sarah Jones’ America, Who Hurt You?) and a left hand over the belly, the ensemble exhales, and their shoulders release. In its final moments, Tayeh pulls the dancers out of their cyclical movements, capturing the feeling of processing loss in this single breath.

This has been a month of public mourning, with Dolly Parton, Bob Mackie, and Duncan Sheik dying within weeks of one another, and Sara Bareilles on her Good Grief tour. The Surge gives grief a body, and someplace to move.

Is ‘The Surge’ worth seeing?

In Surge, Sonya Tayeh builds a driving, tightly wound elegy for Sinéad O’Connor, and when a stretch of swaying lets the tension slacken, the final release earns back what the middle spent.