The Dance Class

When Degas painted this around 1873, the room he was showing already had a countdown running on it. This is a rehearsal hall of the Paris Opera on the rue Le Peletier, where the company trained, and in October of 1873 that whole theatre burned to the ground overnight. Pictures like this one turned into records of an interior that no longer existed. It is one of his busiest dance scenes. Parts of more than 20 dancers crowd the floor, some at the barre, some resting, a pair of legs just visible coming down the spiral staircase at the upper left. Degas kept coming back to these practice rooms rather than the stage, drawn to the stretching, the waiting and the yawning that the paying audience never saw.