An "exquisite hour" with Maina Gielgud. (News).

In his book Letters to a Young Dancer, published in French in 2001, Maurice Bejart wrote that he learned to dance watching French actress Madeleine Renaud in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days--a play in which she hardly moved. Four years ago, the choreographer created a dance theater piece called L'Heure exquise for famed Italian ballerina Carla Fracci and Micha van Hoecke, of Italy's Ensemble Micha van Hoecke, that he called a "variation" on Happy Days. This spring, a new production of L'Heure exquise, starring Maina Gielgud and Martyn Fleming, opened in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Bejart's company is based.

Gielgud, who was to take over direction of the Boston Ballet in 2001 but decided not to, citing differences with the board, and Fleming, a dancer with the Australian Ballet when Gielgud was its artistic director, deliver a moving performance. The piece tells the story of an aging ballerina whose relentless determination to see the positive in everything is a way of denying the present. Bejart's vision is enhanced by strong imagery, such as the opening scene showing the ballerina enclosed in a giant "skirt" made of a mound of old toe shoes. Fleming plays a humorous and empathetic down-at-heels compere who bolsters the dancer as she re-enacts three phases of life and finally, wearing a shroudlike garment, presages her own death.

Interviewed in Lausanne, Gielgud, 57, was enchanted to be working with Beart again after having danced with his company from 1967 to 1971. Undaunted by the star-studded past of L'Heure exquise, she said Bejart had reworked the piece for her and Fleming, and described an ongoing process of creation that continued even after the opening night. When asked how she was handling a speaking role, she said that in some ways it was easier than dancing, which she hasn't done for twenty years.

This is not the first time Gielgud has acted; she played a ballerina in a French TV series in the mid-'70s. As the niece of the late, famed British actor Sir John Gielgud, theater is also in her blood. And well before being cast in Bejart's piece, she was taking drama classes in the belief that a strong focus on theater is what's going to keep audiences interested in ballet. This belief imbues her views on dancers' curricula (acting, improvisations, and mime should play a strong role, she says), her coaching work, and her staging--she staged her own production of Giselle for the Boston Ballet this year, and she's doing another for France's Ballet du Rhin. Her other plans for the future include touring with L'Heure exquise in the immediate, and undertaking more projects that further strong theatrical expression in ballet.