The Ballet Class (Degas, Musée d'Orsay) in the context of Jules Perrot

Ballet (French: [balɛ]) is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of dance with its own vocabulary. Ballet has been influential globally and has defined the foundational techniques which are used in many other dance genres and cultures. Various schools around the world have incorporated their own cultures. As a result, ballet has evolved in distinct ways.

A ballet as a unified work comprises the choreography and music for a ballet production. Ballets are choreographed and performed by trained ballet dancers. Traditional classical ballets are usually performed with classical music accompaniment and use elaborate costumes and staging, whereas modern ballets are often performed in simple costumes and without elaborate sets or scenery.

A ballet master (also balletmaster, ballet mistress, premier maître de ballet or premier maître de ballet en chef) is an employee of a ballet company who is responsible for the level of competence of the dancers in their company. In modern times, ballet masters are generally charged with teaching the daily company ballet class and rehearsing the dancers for both new and established ballets in the company's repertoire. The artistic director of a ballet company, whether a male or female, may also be called its ballet master. Historic use of gender marking in job titles in ballet (and live theatre) is being supplanted by gender-neutral language job titles regardless of an employee's gender (e.g. ballet master in lieu of ballet mistress, wig master as an alternative to wig mistress).

The Dance Class is an 1874 oil painting on canvas by the French artist Edgar Degas. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

The painting and its companion work in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, are amongst the most ambitious works by Degas on the theme of ballet. The imaginary scene depicts a dance class being held under the supervision of Jules Perrot, a famous ballet master, in the old Paris Opera, which had actually burnt down the previous year.The poster on the wall for Rossini's Guillaume Tell is a tribute to the operatic singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, who had commissioned the work.