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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.

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.

Fiona Quilligan was born in Dublin and studied dance at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and the London School of Contemporary Dance. She performed with Dublin City Ballet before founding Rubato Ballet in 1986. Her vision for this collective of professional dance artists was to create new Irish dance works and to pioneer links with related art disciplines, such as music, art, poetry and sculpture. The company achieved high critical acclaim both in Ireland and abroad and was the recipient of the Nijinsky Medal from the Polish Artists Agency Warsaw (1990), the AIB Better Ireland Award for Arts and Culture (1992), and the ESB Environmental Awareness Award (1999).

In 1992, the company founded Rubato Community Arts Project in association with FÁS, which employed 14 artists to provide experiences of dance, music and painting for primary and secondary school children and to establish a role for artists in the community. Rubato Ballet was wound down in 2003, and a year later Quilligan continued her career as a freelance choreographer. More information on Fiona Quilligan and Rubato Ballet can be found at https://www.fionaquilligan.info/.