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FEDORA Opera Prize Winner "The Curing Line" Celebrates its World Premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival
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06 August 2026
Kilkenny / Ireland
Winners
On 6 August 2026, The Curing Line, FEDORA Opera Prize 2025 Winner, celebrated its world premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival, bringing Michael Gallen’s groundbreaking new opera to the stage at the Watergate Theatre.
Created by Irish composer Michael Gallen and produced by Straymaker, The Curing Line explores healing, interconnectivity, cultural loss and environmental collapse through the story of Cora, a young woman who inherits an ancestral healing power but loses her capacity to use it.
Drawing on Ireland’s indigenous traditions of “making cures”, the opera takes audiences into an Irish border town in the 1990s, exploring the fragile connections between sickness and health, the individual and society, and humanity and the natural world. Its distinctive musical language brings together influences ranging from sean-nós and mantra-like repetition to industrial sounds, club music and techno.
Following its world premiere, The Curing Line received strong critical acclaim. The Irish Times as well as the Irish Examiner and Opera Now awarded the production five stars, describing it as opera at its most daring and celebrating the transformative power of live performance. The Arts Desk awarded it four stars, praising Michael Gallen’s layered musical world and the powerful performances of its cast, while calling the work a compelling exploration of Ireland’s traditions of indigenous cures.
"Five-star reminder of why we go to the theatre, or why we go out at all" - The Irish Times
"vibrant and energetic...arresting and confronting in its relatability" - Opera Now
"a rich, multilayered experience...this is two fingers to anyone who thinks opera is stale and dated" - Irish Examiner
Co-directed by Michael Gallen and Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern, with a libretto by Gallen and poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin, the production brings together performers from opera, traditional music and pop, including Amy Ní Fhearraigh, Sarah Shine, Romain Bly, Joséphine Besançon, Caimin Gilmore, Maria Ryan and Oisín Walsh-Peelo.
Congratulations to Michael Gallen, Straymaker and the entire artistic and production team on this remarkable world premiere!
The Curing Line was commissioned by Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and is the FEDORA Opera Prize 2025 Winner, supported by The Silver Company, in collaboration with Opera Europa. The production is presented by Straymaker in association with Kilkenny Arts Festival, Miroirs Étendus, Shawn Fitzgerald Ahern and Once Off Productions.
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Colm Breathnach(on screen) Amy Ni Fhearraigh(left) Sarah Shine(right)_The Curing Line by Michael Gallen -photo Ros Kavanagh
"The Curing Line", Winner of the FEDORA Opera Prize 2025
The Curing Line is a groundbreaking multi-platform opera project by Irish music-theatre company Straymaker which explores themes of healing, interconnectivity, loss of culture and environmental collapse through the story of a woman who inherits a life-saving cure but loses her capacity to use it.
Upcoming Performances:
- 26 - 27 September 2026: Opéra national du Rhin – Cité de la Musique et de la Danse, Strasbourg, France Buy Tickets
- 27 - 28 November 2026: Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, France Buy Tickets
