After visiting a museum in Rwanda and seeing photos of dead child soldiers, Deborah Asiimwe was haunted by their spirits and started to wonder who these children were and what their lives were like.
She displays her experiences in Uganda as a photographer through different forms of media in her most recent production, “Forgotten World.”
Shirley Jo Finney, a guest director and UCLA alumna, is directing Asiimwe’s “Forgotten World.” The show will feature UCLA graduate acting students at the Little Theater in Macgowan Hall from Tuesday through Saturday.
The play focuses on six deceased child soldiers who constantly haunt a photographer for taking photos of them and selling them for personal profit.
Finney said that it elaborates on international tragedies dealing with child soldiers that happen all across the globe.
“You can see it specifically deals with Uganda, but she has opened it up, and so we deal with the child soldiers of North Korea, Colombia, the Congo in Africa and in Pakistan,” Finney said.
Finney has been in contact with Asiimwe during the preparation for the production and said that Asiimwe was inspired when she visited a Rwandan museum dealing specifically with child soldiers.
Asiimwe told Finney that even when she left, the ideas stuck with her, so she knew she had to go back and find out the children’s stories.
“She left and the children haunted her. She would say, “˜Here I am watching and taking photos, and then I go into my world … and I go and live. I kept wondering who these children were and what their stories were about,'” Finney said.
As audience members enter the theater, the atmosphere resembles an art gallery auction.
Photographic prints of child soldiers are up on the walls and viewers will get an idea about what parts of the world are being affected and what type of photos were taken.
Third-year graduate acting student Walt Gray IV, who plays a photographer, said that visitors get transported to where the photos were taken and get to experience what the photographers felt when they were being haunted by the dead child soldiers.
“While we’re trying to make money and trying to get on the cover of National Geographic, these kids keep coming back,” Gray said.
“They’re saying things like, “˜Why are you trying to sell my image?’ There’s a lot of countries where if you take their picture without their permission, it’s like you’re stealing their soul,” he added.
Second-year graduate acting student Josephine Keefe, who also plays a photographer, said that after researching the production, she found that this would be more difficult than roles she is used to taking.
“I knew it was going to be incredibly provocative and challenging as an actor to go through that process of understanding these children and understanding the depths of agony that the photographer goes through as she is trying to understand why these children are haunting her,” Keefe said.
After five weeks of rehearsing and mastering lines, Finney said that some of the students’ views on the issue have changed since beginning the production.
Third-year graduate acting student Tiffany Mitchenor said that “Forgotten World” was one of the most important productions she has ever taken part in, because she feels it is necessary to do social pieces to help open the eyes of those who are unaware of international violence.
“It opens my eyes to how ignorant we are as a society and how we tend to exploit others for the purposes of financial gain. … The stories are real and so touching, and it’s a story I’ve never told. I enjoy telling it, even though it’s very frightening,” Mitchenor said.
Finney said that the show is about taking the concepts of the images the photographer can finally have closure about the dead children.
“We are taking the visuals of the splintered images so that this photographer can have a completion and so that the spirits of these dead children in their souls can have completion so they can transcend into the next stage,” Finney said.