Three Dancers Preparing for Class

Three Dancers Preparing for Class (1878), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the preparatory ritual before the discipline of the dance class begins — the adjusting of shoes, the checking of costumes, the loosening of limbs. By 1878 Degas had been depicting these preparatory moments for several years and had developed a vocabulary of gestures that capture the dancer's body in its working, pre-performance state. The three figures create a small ensemble of varied postures and activities that together describe the routine of preparation without organising themselves into any conventional grouping.

The three figures are arranged without formal compositional symmetry, each absorbed in a different preparatory activity, and Degas creates visual coherence through consistent treatment of light and through the repeated motif of the tutu rather than through formal balance or narrative logic.