FEDORA - The Curing Line

FEDORA
Opera Prize 2025
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The Curing Line

Ireland
Straymaker

Crowdfunding Results

€2,535
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€2,500
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€50,000
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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.

About the Project

Peering through the prism of Ireland’s indigenous traditions of “making cures”, The Curing Line considers 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. It brings its audience on a deeply immersive and multisensorial journey that navigates the thin veils between sickness and health, between self, society and nature, and between living and death.

In research for this project, the Straymaker team conducted extensive interviews with individuals from Irish, Mincéir (Irish Traveller) and migrant backgrounds who have inherited the gift of “making cures”. Many interviewees discussed a fear that they will be the last in a line of countless generations through whom their gift has passed. In The Curing Line, this urgency is distilled into the character of Cora, a healer who has lost her capacity to heal.

Cora’s world is that of an Irish border town in the 1990’s, in the midst of The Troubles. Having been born and grown up in institutional care, she is fostered by a family with a daughter her own age. Cora 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 heal. As the pillars of her internal world crumble, so too do those of the world around her, with violent and devastating consequences.

Ultimately, The Curing Line takes a deeper look at the contours of the healing experience, and asks 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?

Why should you support us?

We believe that this project has the capacity to bring about new ways of thinking about the human world as part of a greater ecosystem, and to fundamentally challenge and alter the way in which modern society considers the themes of extinction, death and healing. Our working methods are innovative and multidisciplinary, creating opera that draws from deep indigenous roots and that is all the more contemporary for it.

As a company, we are at a stage where philanthropic support is vital, allowing us to grow in tandem with our vision and ambition. We hope to bring this pertinent work to a wide international audience, continuing to tell stories and tackle difficult themes in ways that connect with the head and the heart all at once.

Who are we?

Straymaker is an independent opera and music-theatre company based in Ireland's border region. Led by composer Michael Gallen, the company brings together leading Irish and international artists in the creation of groundbreaking, politically-engaged operatic work for both live and digital platforms.