The Curing Line

Winner of the prestigious Fedora International Opera Prize (the world’s largest prize for new opera), The Curing Line explores themes of healing, loss of culture and environmental collapse through the story of Cora, a young woman who inherits a life-saving ancestral healing power but loses her ability to use it.

The Curing Line is co-directed by Michael and long-term collaborator Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern and conducted by Clara Baget, with libretto cowritten by Michael and poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin. Set and Costume design is by Pai Rathaya, Sound design by Simon Cullen and Lighting Design by Yukiko Yoshimoto.

Cora’s world is that of an Irish border town in the 1990’s in the midst of ‘The Troubles’. Having grown up in institutional care, Cora is fostered by a family and inherits a cure for ailments of the breath from her foster father. She works for a disreputable mechanic, curing in the evenings and plunging into wild, intoxicated, and increasingly reckless weekend escapades with her foster sister Eileen. In a life that has been shadowed by chaos, loss and misanthropy, the cure becomes the line that connects Cora to self, ancestry and society. Following their father’s death, a tension grows between the sisters around birthright and inheritance, and a moment of crisis begins to unravel Cora’s belief in her capacity to cure. As the pillars of her internal world crumble, so too do those of the world around her, with violent and devastating consequences.

Through this prism of Ireland’s indigenous traditions of ‘making cures’, the show brings its audience on a journey that navigates the thin veils between sickness and health, self and society and between living and death. It takes a deep look at the contours of healing experience and questions whether, in thinking of the human and the environment as separate, we are failing to acknowledge that fundamental parts of ourselves and our culture are becoming extinct. In a world that hurtles towards its own forgetting, can one truly heal or be healed?

The Curing Line expands the boundaries of opera, bringing together a tight-knit group of leading singers and instrumentalists – Amy Ní Fhearraigh, Sarah Shine, Romain Bly, Josephine Besançon, Caimin Gilmore, Maria Ryan, Oisin Walsh-Peelo – from opera, traditional and pop backgrounds, all of whom play vital character roles . The musical language is an evolution of that in Gallen’s previous opera, Elsewhere; the glitches of sean-nós, the lulling hypnosis of mantras, jagged industrial and factory sounds, the complex rhythms of the body’s pulsations, and the raucous energies of club and techno combining to create a unique and ever-evolving sound world.

Composer Michael Gallen
Libretto Michael Gallen & Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Directors Michael Gallen & Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern
Conductor Clara Baget

Set/Costume Design Pai Rathava
Sound Design Simon Cullen
Lighting Design Yukiko Yoshimoto

Ensemble
Cora Amy Ní Fhearraigh soprano
Eileen Sarah Shine soprano
Romain Bly, Josephine Besancon, Caimin Gilmore, Maria Ryan, Oisín Walsh-Peelo

Commissioned by the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris, The Curing Line was the Winner of the FEDORA Opera Prize 2025 with the support of The Silver Company and is produced by Gallen’s own Straymaker company in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival, Miroirs Étendus and Once Off Productions and is funded by the Arts Council and Creative Monaghan.