Degas made Ballet Dancers by a two-step process he used often in the late 1870s: pulling a monotype, a unique print made by drawing in ink on a bare metal plate and running it through a press, then reworking the resulting image with gouache and pastel^[1]. The monotype gave him a dark, tonal base to build from rather than a blank sheet, and it let him establish the overall pattern of figures quickly before returning to add colour and detail by hand. Degas referred to his monotypes as dessins imprimés, printed drawings, and treated the prints as working material rather than finished statements^[1]. Pastel let him rework the surface repeatedly, laying colour over colour until skin, tulle and stage light built up in overlapping hatched strokes, a method that suited both his taste for revision and, later in life, his failing eyesight^[3].

From the early 1870s Degas shifted his ballet subjects away from the performance itself and toward the rehearsal rooms and wings of the Paris Opera, where dancers exercised, waited and adjusted costume under a ballet master's direction^[4]. He had connections inside the Opera through friends such as the librettist Ludovic Halévy and the bassoonist Désiré Dihau, and it was almost certainly through them that he gained the access that let him work as what one account calls a privileged insider rather than a member of the paying audience^[1]. Ballet Dancers belongs to this body of work: an informal, cropped grouping rather than a staged tableau, closer to what a dancer or a member of the Opera's inner circle would actually have seen backstage^[1].

Degas took up photography seriously only in the mid-1880s, well after his ballet compositions had already established their characteristic cropping and oblique angles, so the connection between his pictures and the camera is one of shared vision rather than direct technical borrowing^[5]. Japanese woodblock prints, circulating in Paris from the 1860s, offered a closer and earlier source: their flattened space, off-centre figures and diverging lines directed a viewer's eye into the picture rather than presenting it frontally, a device Degas adapted for his own crowded, asymmetrical ballet scenes^[6]. Contemporaries recognised the effect. Reviewing Degas's ballet dancers in April 1880, the critic Paul Mantz described the artist's gift for silhouettes of little dancers with sharp elbows, a backhanded compliment that nonetheless registered how sharply observed and unconventionally posed these figures were next to academic dance painting^[3].