Johan Inger’s “Passing” inevitably invites comparison with “Impasse,” seen at the Paris Opéra last season: a jewel of layered composition and reflection, demanding and even transformative, for dancers and audience alike. “Passing,” premiered in May 2023 to a musical collage by Erik Enocksson, Louis T. Hardin and Amos Ben-Tal, feels more tentative: an exploration of movement and theatrical image that never quite reaches the structural depth or choreographic density that made “Impasse” so unforgettable. The work imagines life as a shared journey in all its dimensions, with agrarian motifs lending it a primitive, folkloric, earthly atmosphere, beginning with spirals of soil spread across the stage. One of the evening’s strangest and most memorable images, greeted with laughter by the audience, shows a woman downstage left apparently giving birth to the entire ensemble of twenty dancers, assisted by a man as she screams. One by one, they pass beneath her open legs and cross the stage along a diagonal. It is comic, grotesque, almost absurd, but not only that: beneath the parody, the image also seems to touch on the pressure society places on women, and on the female body as origin, threshold, burden and spectacle. Throughout the ballet, folk-dance inflections, vocal sounds, laughter, crying and surreal vignettes accumulate, as if Inger were trying to let raw human emotion break into ballet form. Yet the piece remains somewhat diffuse. Among its strongest elements are Linda Chow’s costumes, which bring colour, individuality and theatrical pleasure to the stage picture. The ending moves towards a romantically regressive vision of humanity stripped of social convention: under falling snow, the dancers remove their costumes to reveal nude bodysuits, while the snow gradually covers the soil.