About the Passport Ensemble Group
Since its establishment, the ensemble has established its status as a unique voice in independent theater in Israel, with wins and nominations for the Golden Hedgehog Award :
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2014: Six nominations for the play "Passport"; Yael Cramsky won in the stage adaptation category.
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2017 : Nomination for the stage adaptation award and the lighting award for the play "Citizen K."
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2019 : Five nominations for the play "Leah"; actor Eyal Zussman won in the Supporting Actor category.
Alongside its work for adults, the ensemble devotes a significant portion of its activity to work for children, believing that young audiences deserve a complex, rich, and uncompromising theatrical language. These productions are based on classical plays and translated into a high artistic language that preserves the group's unique aesthetics and agenda.
At the same time, the ensemble sees its social mission as an organic and inseparable part of its creative identity. The group consistently operates in hospitals for the mentally challenged throughout the country, out of the perception that theater is an essential space for human encounter and out of a desire to echo the voices of those who are not heard. The ensemble is committed to expanding cultural discourse and reaching diverse audiences in Israel and abroad, out of a sincere love of humanity and a deep connection to the place where we live.
Passport Ensemble , founded in 2014 by director and lab worker Yael Cramsky , is an independent theater group operating in artistic affiliation and collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art . The ensemble constitutes a space for interdisciplinary stage research, seeking to challenge the boundaries of the medium and maintain a sharp and penetrating dialogue with Israeli existence.
Kramsky’s writing and adaptation does not seek to “translate” the text to the stage, but rather acts as an investigative intervention within it. By dismantling traditional hierarchies and reformulating the characters’ identities, the ensemble creates deliberate friction between the narrative – canonical, documentary, or original – and the conflicts of local reality. The stage becomes a laboratory for examining identity, memory, and belonging, seeking to extract from the old text a burning and exposed existential insight.
The ensemble places visual perception as an active and central presence in the stage language. From a joint development process between Kramsky and designers Dina Konson/Liron Sapir and Iris Mualem , a close synergy is woven between the processed word and visual, graphic and digital images.
A core element that distinguishes the ensemble is the movement language, which stems from the fraught tension between Kramski's past as a choreographer and her work with the actor's body. The virtuosity of the dance world gives way to a search for a rooted and compact movement, based on style. The changes in rhythm, intervals and weights create a unique physical syntax, transforming the actor's body into a powerful instrument of expression equal in importance to the spoken word.