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Dance company founded by Fiona Quilligan.

Not known.

Joyce Richardson began dancing at the age of two. Having started with Irish dancing, she moved to ballet when nine years old, training at the Myrtle Lambkin School of Dance. By sixteen, she had completed all major classical exams and perfected her training at the Urdang Academy of Ballet and Performing Arts at Covent Garden, London. Her subsequent career in dance has taken many forms, including music videos and touring in popular musicals such as 'Jesus Christ Superstar' and 'West Side Story'. She has also appeared on several popular TV-shows and collaborated with great Irish performers, including Maureen Potter, Brendan Grace, and Ronnie Drew.

Joyce Richardson discovered flamenco while recovering in Jerez, Spain after a personal tragedy, and later trained in Spain and London with great flamenco stars such as Maria Maya, Belen Maya, Javier la Torre, Esperanza Linares, and Ana Salazar. She began teaching flamenco in 2005 and in the same year founded her Dublin-based company, Aires Flamencos.

Thomas Spring Rice was born in Limerick on 8 February 1790, the only son in a family of three. His parents were Stephen Edward Rice of Mount Trenchard, county Limerick, and Catherine Spring, only child and heiress of Thomas Spring of Castlemain, county Kerry. He had a distinguished career as a politician, representing Limerick in Parliament from 1820 to 1832, and the borough of Cambridge from 1832 to 1839. He was made Under Secretary of State for the Home Department in 1827, and served as joint Secretary to the Treasury from 1830 to 1834 under Lord Grey. His other appointments included Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1835 to 1839, and Comptroller of the Exchequer from 1835 until his death in 1866. He was raised to the peerage as first Baron Monteagle of Brandon in the county of Kerry on 5 September 1839. In his role as politician, Thomas Spring Rice was instrumental in the authorisation of the ordnance survey of Ireland at six inches to a mile in 1824, and the establishment of the Irish National School system in 1832.

Thomas Spring Rice married twice, firstly (in 1811) Lady Theodosia Pery, second daughter of the first Earl of Limerick, by whom he had eight children. In 1841, following the death of his first wife in 1839, Lord Monteagle married Mary Anne Marshall. There were no children from the second marriage. Following Lord Monteagle’s death on 7 February 1866, the title passed to his grandson and namesake, Thomas Spring Rice (1849-1926).

Thomas Spring Rice enjoyed great popularity in his native city of Limerick. In 1820, he was invited to stand as an election candidate against Charles Vereker in an attempt to free the borough from the corruption of its Corporation and the tight control exercised by the Vereker family. When defeated, Thomas Spring Rice appealed to parliament to have the election result overturned on grounds that many of the Vereker voters were non-resident in the city. The enquiry which followed his petition resulted in the imprisonment of the city Recorder for prevarication and the declaration of Thomas Spring Rice as MP for Limerick. In parliament, he instigated an investigation into the affairs of the old Corporation of Limerick, which resulted in the passing of the Limerick Regulation Act of 1823.

In 1832, Thomas Spring Rice declared that he would not be seeking re-election in the city, mainly owing to his opposition to the proposed Repeal of the Act of Union. From 1832 to 1839, he represented the borough of Cambridge in the parliament. His many contributions to Limerick city are commemorated in the painting The Chairing of Thomas Spring Rice, MP, by William Turner, commissioned by the Limerick Chamber of Commerce in 1822, and a statue by Thomas Kirk, erected by the Barrington family at Pery Square in 1829 on top of a monument designed by Henry Aaron Baker.

Lorna Teresa Reynolds was born on 17 January 1911 in Jamaica as the eldest of five children of Michael Reynolds and Teresa Anne née Hickey. When her father died in 1921, she and her family returned to Ireland. Having spent three years in Birr, county Offaly, the family moved to Dublin, where Lorna completed her secondary education at the Dominican College on Eccles Street. She continued her education at University College Dublin, where she studied English, obtaining a BA in 1933, an MA in 1935 and a doctorate in 1940. Her doctoral dissertation dealt with the Bible. During her college years, she made lasting friendships with Mary Lavin, Cyril Cusack and Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien.

Shortly after graduating, Reynolds joined the teaching staff at UCD, where her striking presence, intense love of English literature and ability to listen made her highly popular among students. Her relationships with the college authorities was less successful, particularly so in the case of the then president, Michael Tierney, to whom she refers in her letters as ‘the snake in the grass’. In 1966, Reynolds was appointed Professor of Modern English at University College Galway. Here, she revitalised the department and organised a number of high-profile conferences, most notably the J. M. Synge centenary conference in 1971. She served as editor of the University Review (now Irish University of Review) in the 1950s. She also co-edited two books with Robert O’Driscoll, Yeats and the Theatre (1975) and The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (1988).

In addition to being a distinguished academic, Reynolds was an accomplished poet and translator of Italian poetry, sometimes in collaboration with Gioia Gaidoni (1915-1993). Her poems and short stories were published in the Dublin Magazine in the 1940s and later in The Bell, Poetry Ireland, Arena, The Lace Curtain and Botteghe Oscure. She was a familiar figure at various international writers’ conferences and socialised with many of the leading European writers of the day.

One of defining aspects of Reynolds’ life was her strong belief in women’s rights and the importance of their contribution to Irish society. She was a leading member of the Women’s Social and Progressive League in the 1940s and actively involved in the UCD Women Graduates’ Association. She was also a popular after-dinner speaker at various women’s groups.

In 1978, Reynolds returned to Dublin to live in the old family home on Merrion Square. She derived great pleasure from entertaining friends and was an excellent cook, a skill which culminated in the publication of a cook book, Tasty Food for Hasty Folk, in 1990.

Lorna Reynolds died on 4 July 2003 aged 91.

Rex Levitates Dance Company was co-founded in 1999 by choreographer Liz Roche (b. 1975) and dancer Jenny Roche (b. 1972) to further the contemporary dance art form, forge new performance modes, and encourage and promote dance awareness. The company is known for its entertaining, innovative, and thought-provoking dance works and its distinctive contemporary non-narrative style which draws influence from visual art. Rex Levitates has performed throughout Ireland and abroad in China, France, Cyprus, and the UK, and was the winner of the Dublin Dance Festival’s Jayne Snow Award in 2002. In March 2012, Rex Levitates Dance Company changed its name to Liz Roche Company.

Domy Reiter-Soffer was born in Tel Aviv and began his career with Israel Ballet in 1959. In 1962, he became a member of Irish Theatre Ballet, Ireland’s first professional ballet company, and danced as a guest with Cork Ballet Company, both of which were run under the artistic directorship of Joan Denise Moriarty. In 1964, he moved to the UK, where he became a member of London Dance Theatre, The Western Theatre Ballet at Saddler’s Wells, and The Scottish Ballet. He has also been a guest artist with major American ballet companies, among others New York Contemporary Dance Company, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, American Ballet Theatre 2, Ballet Met, and Ohio Ballet. He also danced with the Israeli Bat-Dor Dance Company and acted as its resident choreographer, creating over thirty ballets for the company. From 1975-1989 he acted as artistic advisor and choreographer of Irish National Ballet creating over twenty works, among them Women, Yerma, Paradise Gained, Lady of the Camellias, Pomes Penyeach, La Valse, Chariots of Fire, House of Bernarda Alba, and Oscar, the company’s last ballet before its disbandment in 1989. Domy Reiter-Soffer’s distinguished career has seen him as director of numerous plays, musicals, and operas, choreographer for film, opera, and television, and designer of over thirty dance and theatre productions across the world. He is also an accomplished painter, with twenty-two one-man shows in Europe, America, and Israel.

Nan Quinn lived in Bessbrook, county Armagh, Northern Ireland and was introduced to Irish dancing by a nun in Bessbrook Convent in c. 1911. She established a traditional Irish dancing school in Bessbrook in 1933. She was a member of Cumann na mBan and a committed republican and was highly regarded in traditional Irish dance and republican circles.