The present sculpture belongs to a series of bronzes of ballerinas and dancers made by Marini between 1949 and 1954. Patrick Waldberg writes: "It is this very essence of dance that Marino has grasped so well and expressed so masterfully in his often polychromed statues and statuettes whose freedom of execution and naturalness may perhaps be without equivalent save in the little Etruscan bronzes. Futurism, like the earliest cinematography, sought to translate movement by plotting the succession of forms described by a traveling figure: a walking, running of otherwise moving body. Thus were born, the same year and heeding the same imperatives, the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of Boccioni and Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier, both key achievements of the modern intelligence but which, through their very completeness, seem to rule out any further advance in the same direction. Taking quite the opposite one, Marino, when he presents a dancer or a juggler, stresses not so much the movement itself as the tension which renders it possible. The dancer is shown to us, not in repose, for such a thing does not exist in the sphere of dance, but in a state of suspense, in that instant of straining stillness where action either emerges or else expires. 'State of transition and almost of violence', are Valéry's words for this interval of immobility in dance. It is with an extraordinary economy of means that Marino suggests the effort underlying the dancer's movement; here a faintly bracing leg, there an arm lifting, in another place a foot poised vertically on its tip".

The other examples of the bronze are housed in the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffallo and the Hans C. Bechtler collection, Zurich. A version in lead is in the Emilio Jesi collection, Milan, and the polychrome plaster, previously in the artist's collection, is now in the Fondazione Marino Marini in Pistoia.