Dancer in a Café is an oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. The work was created while Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, in preparation for the Salon de la Section d'Or, were publishing, Du "Cubisme", the first major defense of the Cubist movement, and it was first displayed at the 1912 Salon d'Automne in Paris. The work proved controversial within the Municipal Council of Paris, causing debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to exhibit such 'barbaric' art, with the Cubists being defended by the Socialist deputy Marcel Sembat.

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907, Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.