Experimental Concert Film + Live Performance

Be & Become

How do I embrace who I am while leaving room for who I am becoming?

An experimental concert film built around Mila Tina’s live drumming, layered with animation, photography, speeches and images. Created as the pandemic began in 2020 and shared with young people through OLA of Eastern Long Island’s Myth & Motion.

Type
Experimental Concert Film
Year
2020
Medium
Live Drumming + Animation + Archival Images
Presented
OLA Myth & Motion, Parrish Art Museum, Sag Harbor Cinema
Overview

To be. To become.

To “be” is to meet the present self with acceptance: what is felt, what is known, what remains unresolved. To “become” is to leave that identity open to possibility, allowing desire, imagination and experience to shape what comes next. Acceptance gives change a place to begin.

Through fire and water, the film enters the aliveness and complexity of Mother Nature, where Mila finds an echo of her own inner world. Rage and resistance widen the frame from personal experience to collective struggle. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” meets images of the protests of 2020, placing the promise of one generation beside the demands of another.

The final movement opens into color, celebration and individual faces. A shared dance takes shape across cultures and ways of being. The journey through darkness returns to the world with a question: how might becoming ourselves also change what we can become together?

Presentations
September 1, 2020

Myth & Motion

Virtual event presented by OLA of Eastern Long Island, led by Minerva Perez for young people and their emotional well-being. Singer-songwriter Skylar Day’s “Myth” followed by the concert film of Be & Become.

August 20, 2021

Live at the Parrish Art Museum

Be & Become performed at OLA’s Pachanga at the Parrish Art Museum, with Svitlana Zavialova (Wu Woman) bringing martial arts and movement alongside the drumming.

September 18, 2021

Sag Harbor Cinema

Myth & Motion screened in the Under 21 program of OLA’s 18th Annual Latino Film Festival of the Hamptons. The festival program listed it as a 28-minute video concert.

Excerpts
The Mother Nature sequence
Greta Thunberg’s speech meets the live drumming
Stills
Live drumming recorded at First Live Studio, Brooklyn. Behind the scenes with the team.
Credits

Myth & MotionAn OLA of Eastern Long Island project led by Minerva Perez, produced by OLA Media Lab, featuring Skylar Day and Mila Tina.

Be & BecomeA Mila Tina production in association with OLA of Eastern Long Island.

Executive producerMinerva Perez

Producer, director, live performer, editor and sound mixerCarolina Fuentes, also known as Mila Tina

Assistant director and assistant video editorElizabeth Chavez

Recording, live mixing, camera, video mixing and broadcastingDanny García

Recording engineering, lighting and stage designEdrick Subervi

MakeupDiana Osorio

Parrish performance collaboratorSvitlana Zavialova

Additional music, footage and photography are credited in the film.

How to allow myself to be, while remaining open to what I can become. And how that personal possibility connects to what we might become together.

System Index // Be & Become // Experimental Concert Film, 2020