The work, not the gala

There is a particular kind of trick a painting can pull where, the longer you look at it, the more you realize what isn’t there. The Dance Classis one of those. There is no dance in it. There is no stage. There is no audience, no orchestra pit, no costumes more elaborate than a plain white practice tutu, no glow of footlights, no curtain. About twenty-four young women in pale tutus are scattered across a high, drafty rehearsal room. One is scratching her back. One is twisting around to look at a friend. One is fixing a sash. Most are just standing, waiting for something. An elderly man in a brown jacket leans heavily on a long walking stick and seems to be saying something nobody is listening very hard to. And that — the wait, the slouch, the scratch — is the whole subject of the painting.

For a French audience in the 1870s this was a small shock. Ballet, in their world, was glamour. The Paris Opéra (the city’s grand state opera house, which also ran the ballet) put on the most famous dance performances in Europe; tickets were expensive, the gas-lit theater dripped with chandeliers, and the dancers on stage were the city’s manufactured stars. You were supposed to paint the show: the leap, the swirl, the spotlight catching gauze. Edgar Degas (1834–1917), a Paris-born painter who would become one of the central figures of Impressionism, pointed his attention at the exact opposite. He painted the rehearsal — the daily room where the dance got made, hours before the public ever saw it.

To understand why that was a real provocation, you have to know what a Paris Opéra rehearsal room actually was, because it was nothing like the romantic image the word “ballet” puts in your head. It was a factory floor. The Opéra ballet was a working corps of around 150 dancers, most of them teenage girls and young women from working-class Paris families. They started training as small children — Parisians called the youngest ones petits rats(literally “little rats,” because they scampered through the back corridors of the opera house). They drilled six days a week in long rehearsal sessions, did multiple shows a week in the season, were paid wages a Parisian seamstress would have recognized, and were, for most of them, the family breadwinner. The famous ones at the very top earned real money. Everyone else earned a living, and only just.

And the room itself was an unromantic working space. Bare wood floors, doused with water from a watering can so the dancers wouldn’t slip (the can sits in the painting; Chapter 3 will point you at it). High windows for daylight. Wooden bars fixed to the walls to stretch and warm up against. Wooden benches along the walls for the people who weren’t dancing at that moment to sit on. Cluttered, crowded, hot in summer, freezing in winter, smelling of sweat and rosin.

It also had a feature Degas painted as plainly as he painted the floor: the stage mothers. Sitting on benches in dark dresses, hats on, are women who came with their daughters to every rehearsal — chaperones, in theory. Degas places them not where you might expect them (across the room as a row of guardians along a wall) but at the upper right of the canvas, just by the doorway opening into the secondary room behind the dancers — the threshold the rest of the world used to come into the rehearsal. That position matters. It is the door through which the second, uglier feature of the Opéra economy walked in: the abonnés (pronounced “ah-buh-NAY”), the wealthy male season-ticket holders whose subscription bought them, along with their seats, the right to walk backstageand into the rehearsal rooms. They came to scout, to flirt, to “sponsor,” to pick out a dancer to take to dinner and what came after dinner.

It is tempting to read the chaperones as a defense against the abonnés, and the painting half-invites that reading. But look at the structure honestly. A mother sitting by the door cannot actually keep a season-ticket holder out — his ticket is what grants the access, and her presence does not revoke it. What the chaperone could do was witness, and a witness in that economy was less a barrier than a chaperone in the older sense: a respectability-prop a working-class family could put between their daughter and the men her labor had to be sold to. The arrangements that came out of that room ran the gamut, from long-term liaisons to legal marriages to what we would now plainly call exploitation, but the coercion was in the structure, not in the form of the outcome. A marriage to an abonnéwas not better than a liaison with one; both were the asymmetry — his wealth, her wages, his backstage pass, her wage-earning body — wearing different costumes. The mother by the doorway is the visible edge of that economy: a working-class parent posted at the entrance, watching the men who paid for the right to walk through it.

This is the world Degas had been quietly studying for years. He had friends inside the Opéra (the painting’s commission, in Chapter 2, comes through one of them). He was allowed backstage. He sat in on classes. He sketched the same gestures — the bored stretch, the adjusted shoulder strap, the foot rubbing the back of a calf — over and over, until they were as available to him as a portrait painter’s catalog of expressions. He did not, by the way, want to be called an Impressionist; he disliked the label, hated painting outdoors, and worked entirely in the studio from drawings and memory. But when his friends Monet and Pissarro and Renoir went to invent a new way of painting modern life — the present-tense city, the actual world they lived in, not the mythological past — Degas’s contribution was the indoor side of that argument. They painted train stations, gardens, harbors, cafés. He painted the laundress, the milliner, the singer, the jockey, the bather, and above all the dancer. Not the dancer onstage. The dancer at work — under the supervision of a ballet master (the senior man in charge of training the corps and running rehearsals; the head of the dance school inside the opera house), the man leaning on the long stick at the right of the canvas.

So when you stand in front of The Dance Classyou are looking at the under-side of glamour. The audience that came to the Opéra never saw this room. They saw the show. Degas painted the day shift that made the show possible — the wages, the chaperones at the door, the watering can, the bored teenager scratching her back — and asked you to see it as serious art. That was a quiet provocation in 1874, and the picture is still doing it now.