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Dr Ruth Fleischmann was born in Cork in 1942 as the eldest of five children of the composer and conductor Aloys Fleischmann and his wife Anne née Madden. She graduated from University College Cork in 1963 and continued her studies at the German University of Tübingen. She was awarded a PhD by University College Cork in 1983. From 1981 until her retirement in 2007, Fleischmann held a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Bielefeld in Germany. She lives in Germany, has written extensively on Irish literature, and is the editor and author of several books on Joan Denise Moriarty and members of the Fleischmann family.

Thomas Graham and Joyce Ann MacCafferty were former pupils and dancers of the Belfast-born Patricia Mulholland (1915-1992). Mulholland was the founder of the Irish Ballet School in Belfast and of the Irish Ballet Company, which made its debut in 1951 during the Festival of Britain in the Empire Theatre, Belfast. In 1953, at the request of CEMA, Mulholland devised and produced the first Irish folk ballet, Cuchulain. A further group of ballets was sponsored by CEMA, including The Piper, The Dream of Angus Óg, and Follow Me Down to Carlow. Other works in her extensive choreography, strongly influenced by Irish legends and folklore, include The Mother of Oisín, The Black Rogue, the Oul’ Lammas Fair in 1900, The Children of Lír, Phil the Fluter’s Ball, and The Hound of Culann. Mulholland’s choreographies were not ballet in the classical sense but a form of folk ballet – Irish mythology interpreted by Irish dancers to Irish music and song. Patricia Mulholland is regarded as one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century Irish traditional dancing and the founder of Festival Dance, a specialised form of Irish dancing which focuses on the individuality of each dancer’s style, thus breaking away from the more rigid and formulaic ‘Feis’ style.

Adrienne Brown was born in Dublin and began her dance education with ballet classes. She later developed an interest in contemporary dance and spent three years studying at London Contemporary Dance School. Between 1991 and 1998, she attended the Martha Graham Center of Dance in New York, where she gained first place in her teacher-training certificate course. She was co-founder with Anne Lise Schmitt of New Balance Dance Company in 1987, and a founding member of Dance Ireland, acting as its chair from 2008 to 2013. Adrienne taught movement to actors at the Gaiety School of Acting for twenty years, developing a programme suited to the needs of the training actor. Since 1994, she has been teaching technique and choreography at Inchicore College of Further Education.

As a choreographer, Adrienne has remained true to dance as a specific form of expression emerging from the mastery of the human body in motion. For her creative work, Adrienne draws on movement, narrative, text, musicality, and compositional elements. She has collaborated with several composers, including Paul Hayes, JJ Vernon, Michael Seaver, Mel Mercier, Trevor Knight, and Siobhan Cleary, and has taken inspiration from the writings of Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Paula Meehan, Charlotte Mew, and Beth Ann Fennelly. Her repertoire, which has been staged in Ireland, England, and France, comprises over 40 choreographies, including 'Fin de Siecle' (1989), 'Of No Dreams Remember' (1989), 'Six Women in Search of a Dance' (1990), 'The Wounds of Art' (1990), 'Two Into One Won’t Go' (1991), 'Cry' (1992), 'For Delia' (1993), 'The Well' (1994), 'The Sin Eater' (1995), 'Meeting Points & Translations' (1995), 'Four Points of a Circle' (1995), 'Sculptura' (1996), 'This Happened' (1996), 'Mapping a Route Home' (1996), 'Love is a Beautiful Bondage, Too' (1997), 'You Who Have Never Arrived' (2001), 'Voices' (2002), 'Who Moves You' (2004), 'A Study of Bach’s Musical Offering (I)' (2005), 'A Study of Bach’s Musical Offering (II)' (2006), 'Lumen' (2010), 'One' (2011), 'Arctic Birds’ Song' (2012), and 'Exodus: A New Earth' (2013).

In 1997, Adrienne was the first Irish choreographer to be invited to participate in the Righting Dance project at the Institute of Choreography and Dance, Cork. This was a mentored research project, which took place over three years under Adrienne’s chosen mentor, the international choreographer Kim Brandstrup of Arc Dance. This extensive creative process gave rise to a full-length dance work, 'Colmcille', which premiered in 2000 and toured Ireland in 2001.

Between 2002 and 2006, Adrienne completed a BA degree in University College Dublin, graduating with honours in Music and English, and an honours MA in American Studies. Following her MA thesis in 2006, she was awarded an Ad Astra Research Scholarship from UCD to undertake a four-year PhD in Musicology and Dance, leading to the completion of a doctoral dissertation, 'Meaning Indicators in Twentieth-Century Music and Dance', in 2012.

The De Lavals were a notable Huguenot family who claimed descent from King Henry IV of France and held title to extensive seigneuries in Picardy. Like other Huguenot families, they had greatly benefited from the Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598, which granted substantial rights to Calvinist Protestants in a strongly Catholic country. The Edict was bitterly opposed by the Catholic clergy and many French parliaments and was eventually revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. The revocation deprived French Protestants of all religious and civil liberties and subjected them to intense religious persecution. The Vicomte Henri Robert d’Ully de Laval was imprisoned at Laon in 1688 and his estates were declared forfeit. He was able to escape in September 1689, and eventually sought refuge in Ireland. He moved to Portarlington in 1695, where his rank and considerable wealth allowed him to establish a leading position in the community.

In 1808, the Vicomte’s great-granddaughter Deborah Charlotte Newcombe married Thomas Gilbert Willis, son of Thomas Willis, the Master of Portarlington’s most famous French school. Thomas Gilbert, who had taken Holy Orders in the Anglican community, was appointed Rector of Kilmurry Church, Limerick (now adjacent to the campus of the University of Limerick); his son Thomas was appointed Curate to the same church in 1832. Thomas Gilbert was also appointed Prebendary to St Mary’s Cathedral, and Master of the Diocesan School which he ran from his house in Thomas Street. He died in 1837 and was buried outside the west door of the Cathedral. Following his death, his widow opened a Day and Boarding School for Young Ladies in No. 5 Pery Square, while his son William continued to run the private school in Thomas Street. Thus, the strong tradition of education established by the Willis family in Portarlington was successfully extended to Limerick.

James Devine was born in Ireland and began to take dance lessons at the age of eight. At the age of fourteen he became the only Irishman to have won the World, American, British, and All-Ireland Irish dancing titles in the same year. In 1996, Devine was selected by Michael Flatley to star in his Lord of the Dance show and spent two years performing in the show’s global tour. Between 1998 and 2000, Devine lived in Australia where he choreographed, directed, and performed the lead role in the dance show GaelForce, which toured worldwide. Since 2001, Devine has lived predominantly in America where he has taught Irish dancing to thousands of enthusiasts. In February 2005, he began work on a new solo project, Tapeire, which premiered the following year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to critical acclaim. The show’s success inspired Devine to found his own production entity, Devine Dance Company, and to bring Tapeire on tour in America and Canada. Devine is widely respected as a leader in the world of percussive dance and holds the world record for fastest tap-dancing speed.

Dr László Felföldi is the head of the Folk Dance Department at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and a member of a number of distinguished professional cultural organisations. His work centres on Hungarian folk dance traditions and those of Hungarian national minorities in Eastern Europe.

Ann Gallagher, the daughter of Frank and Cecilia Gallagher, was born in Dublin. She attended the Abbey School of Ballet under Muriel Kelly’s direction as a child, and it was at the Abbey School that her lifelong interest in ballet started. She was interested in and exposed to all aspects of Dublin’s cultural life from an early age, and began visiting ballets and collecting programmes, which form the core of this collection.

Deirdre Grant was born in Wexford and was first introduced to contemporary dance in that town in 1984, when she joined the Barefoot Youth Dance Company. She later gained a BA in Dance with Education from Middlesex University, London, undertook post-graduate training in Community and Youth Dance, and has recently trained with Joan Davis (Certificate of Somatic Studies). In 1999, she co-founded Myriad Dance with Brid Malone, and remains the company’s artistic director. Grant is the author of Are We Dancing Yet, published by Wexford County Council in December 2011.

Myriad Dance successfully promoted dance awareness, participation, and appreciation regionally through various dance performance-based initiatives (mainly site specific works) and development initiatives, including the Sonraigh Youth Dance Festival and the Pulse Youth Dance Programme (2001-2008) in partnership with Wexford County Council. The latter was expanded in 2009 and continued to operate under the name Education and Community Programme @ Myriad as the largest youth dance partnership with a local authority in Ireland. In July 2009, Myriad Dance moved into the newly built Wexford Opera House, in which they were one of two resident dance companies. Over the years, the dance company’s intense focus in youth and education left it at odds with its original role as a production company. As a consequence, the dance company was wound down in 2015.