‘People like me needed Sinéad O’Connor’: how the singer and activist inspired a new dance work

Tony-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh was ‘broken up’ when she heard about the Irish singer-songwriter’s death three years ago. Now she and a group of over-40s female dancers are paying homage: ‘People love her, people need her’

Sonya Tayeh remembers watching Saturday Night Live in October 1992, at home in Detroit, when a young, shaven-headed woman behind a microphone tore a picture of Pope John Paul II into pieces, while saying: “Fight the real enemy.”

“I felt like the entire world paused,” remembers Tayeh, still in wonder at Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against abuses in the Catholic church, and the defiance in “those eyes that just seep through your soul and burn … It was like I could feel the world vibrate under my feet. I was overcome,” she says, on our video call from New York. I can see Tayeh has one side of her head shaved – a long curtain of dark hair sweeps down the other.
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