The dancer takes a bow at the close of a performance, caught mid-gesture from a box positioned high and to one side of the stage, a viewpoint that gives the image its French title, L'Etoile, the Star. Degas used this elevated, oblique angle across several works of the mid-1870s to make the viewer feel present in the theatre rather than simply looking at a flat record of it, a device his contemporaries recognised as new to painting^[1]. In these compositions the stage manager and other dancers appear only partially, glimpsed in the wings at the edge of the frame, which reinforces the sense that this is a fragment of a real, ongoing scene rather than a posed tableau^[1]. Soft pastel colour and touches of shimmering white suggest stage lighting falling across the dancer's costume, an effect Degas achieved by building colour in delicate layers over the darker monotype base beneath^[1].

Degas made a large group of ballet works in the 1870s using a two-stage method: a monotype pulled in ink on a bare metal plate established the composition's dark tonal structure, and pastel was then worked over the print to add colour, light and finish^[2]. This let him establish the overall pattern of a scene, including cropped, overlapping figures, quickly and freely before returning to refine costume, skin and stage light with the crayon held directly in the fingers. Degas favoured pastel increasingly through the 1870s partly because it suited his taste for reworking a surface repeatedly, letting him build up transparency through layered strokes without the wet mixing that oil paint requires^[2].

Most of Degas's roughly fifteen hundred ballet works show anonymous dancers, generalised figures caught in rehearsal rather than named individuals. A smaller group of works instead identifies a specific Opera performer in the title, a practice Degas had already used for Mademoiselle Eugenie Fiocre in his 1867 Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet from La Source, where the sitter's name announces that a real dancer, not an invented type, is depicted^[2]. Naming Rosita Mauri in this pastel places it in that same tradition of documentary portraiture within the ballet subject, distinct from the interchangeable rehearsal-room figures elsewhere in Degas's output. Mauri was a leading dancer at the Paris Opera in the period, and giving her name in the title records a specific, dated performance rather than a type.