Carmelina and Andrea visited Melbourne metropolitan high schools and inner-city English language centres for new immigrants, to observe student behaviour and attitudes, and to discuss multi-cultural issues and cross-cultural communication with students. With other Handspan artists, they extended the experience through puppetry and drama workshops in schools exchanging skills and information around the topic and recording oral histories.

Before they work began, they had expected to find that tensions which had been evident for children of Australia’s post-war migrant influx of the 50s and 60s would have dissipated by the enlightened 1980s. They were shocked in their research to find that little had changed since Carmelina’s schooldays when ‘wogs’ and ‘dagos’ were bullied and ostracised.

The resultant play, A CHANGE OF FACE followed the story of Linda (the ‘Skip’), who, after moving into inner city Melbourne with her mother after a family break-up, changes schools and encounters classmates from diverse cultural backgrounds. In this milieu, Linda is the odd one out, but not as odd as her friend Hoan, a recently arrived migrant from Vietnam.

The play moved between the school yard and home life for its protagonists: Linda, from several generations of British-Australian stock; Angelo, a second generation Italo-Australian and Angela, a second-generation Greek-Australian, with families whose home life was firmly entrenched in pre-war European cultural traditions; and Hoan, recently escaped from war-torn Vietnam, and an orphan. The play dramatised the students’ conflicts and the differences in their backgrounds. The trauma of teenage racism and cross generational tension in their world was sharply drawn.

Actors, all from culturally specific backgrounds, played the teenage students. Puppets retold the stories of their parents and illustrated their various ethnic circumstances, perspectives and experience. Reviewer, Anna Epstein from Multicultural Arts Victoria recognised the play’s basis in reality:

Design for A CHANGE OF FACE was simple and tourable. Puppet characters were worn as costumes and operated by an innovative manipulation technique that, with the puppet head secured in front of the actor’s own masked face, animated their different stories of migration and integration into Australian society. Moveable screens slid and revolved from scene to scene as the play portrayed arguments at home and brutal bullying and racist name calling in the classroom. Desperation finally provoked near violence, averted. in the schoolyard. Friendships were established as individual similarities became obvious, and tentative overtures towards mutual understanding were broached.

Student audiences were moved and engaged by a work which mirrored their own situations and unmasked well-recognised behaviours. Lowdown Magazine’s review noted:

A CHANGE OF FACE played over 100 performances in 1986 in Melbourne metropolitan High Schools, appeared at the 1987 World ASSITEJ Conference² in Adelaide and toured for the Victorian and South Australian Arts Councils to regional areas in those States.

The play was a bold and exciting production for high school audiences and an affirmative step for young multi-cultural artists emerging in Australia at the time. Roberto Micale and Mary Coustas, Angelo and Angela respectively, in the play created its sequel Who Are You? in 1987 with Handspan. In the same year, Wogs Out of Work³ which explored similar issues through comedy, involved some of these artists and led to a decade of stage and television success and theatrical representation of multicultural community realities in Australia.

For Handspan, it was again a new work that grew from the vision of company artists to make sense of their own environment and circumstances and to portray their concerns and sensibilities in accessible and dynamic theatre for social change.