Sonya Tayeh’s new dance piece turns Sinéad O’Connor’s 1992 SNL protest into a reckoning

Tony-winning choreographer Sonya Tayeh was “broken up” when she heard about Sinéad O’Connor’s death three years ago. Now she is paying homage through a new dance work, with a group of over-40s female dancers, built around the idea: “People love her, people need her.”

Tayeh says her emotional fuse goes back to October 1992, when she watched Sinéad O’Connor on Saturday Night Live from home in Detroit. She describes a young, shaven-headed woman at a microphone tearing a picture of Pope John Paul II into pieces while saying, “Fight the real enemy.” Tayeh remembers feeling like “the entire world paused,” as she watched an act that mixed protest, vulnerability, and refusal to look away. “I felt like the entire world paused,” she says, and she describes “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,” on a video call from New York.

Why a dance premiere should matter to executives and operators, though? Because this is not just memorial theater. It is an artifact of how public defiance travels into institutions, how it forces audiences to confront real harms, and how it shapes the cultural “rules of the room” for years afterward. Tayeh ties O’Connor’s protest to abuses in the Catholic church, and that framing matters: it is not protest as aesthetics, it is protest as accountability. In other words, when an artist tells an audience to “fight the real enemy,” the enemy is not vague. It is the mechanism that protects abuse, and it is the silence that lets it continue.

There is also a business-adjacent point hiding in Tayeh’s specifics: she is not staging this with a token ensemble of young dancers. The work uses a group of over-40s female dancers. That decision shifts who gets to carry the emotional weight. It matters because audiences often assign protest energy to youth, then move on. An over-40s ensemble changes the center of gravity, making the act feel less like a headline and more like lived memory, like consequences that stayed.

Then there is the production psychology. Tayeh’s own physical description reinforces the long tail of influence. She tells the story while, as the article notes, she has one side of her head shaved, with a long curtain of dark hair sweeping down the other. That detail does not need to be symbolic, but it becomes one anyway. In protest culture, the body is part of the message. Onstage, that becomes a design constraint and a storytelling tool. In executive terms, it is a reminder that narratives do not live only in memos. They live in the identities organizations choose to amplify and the symbols they decide to repeat.

If you want the governance lesson, it is in O’Connor’s act as Tayeh frames it: defiance against abuses in the Catholic church. Public institutions are often judged less by what they promise and more by how they respond when abuse is named. O’Connor’s moment on national television in October 1992 is remembered here as a kind of global pause, an interruption loud enough to break through inertia. That is the same emotional pattern that shows up when regulators, boards, and compliance teams finally act, after too-long delays. The point is not that a dance work replaces regulation. It is that culture can either keep harms normalized or force a reckoning.

Executives should also note the second-order risk and upside for any organization operating under public scrutiny. When communities feel “the entire world paused,” expectations rise. People look for follow-through, and they expect leaders to respond with something more than process. Tayeh’s work, anchored in a widely recognized protest, shows how an artist can turn mass attention into a long-term moral reference point. Boards, brand teams, and HR leaders can’t assume that attention is ephemeral. In today’s media cycle, cultural moments become governance moments, whether companies request that or not.

Finally, there is a strategic stake for anyone in leadership roles who relies on institutions, venues, labels, or platforms. Tayeh is a Tony-winning choreographer, which places her inside mainstream prestige systems. Yet she draws from a moment of radical disruption. That mix is the takeaway: legitimacy and dissent can share the same stage. If you lead an organization in 2026, you can learn from the structure of her inspiration. Make the work about what people actually need, not what is easy to sell. Keep your focus on real harm, real accountability, and the people who carry the emotional cost of silence. Because when the world pauses, it is usually asking one question: what are you going to do next?