Degas created paintings of ballet in both oils and pastels. Pastels, however, seem to have been best for swiftly capturing the dancers’ movements. They dominated in Degas’s oeuvre in the latter half of his career, accounting for more than 700 works. Here positioning the dancers diagonally on the horizontal picture plane creates a sense of depth and rhythm, a favorite Degas technique. Since he applied colors to the painting as a whole and carefully corrected the figures’ outlines, this pastel may have been a study for an oil painting also entitled Dancers in a Rehearsal Room (1895-96, Von der Heydt-Museum) completed around the same time.