The Heroine’s Journey

Making room for the whole woman.

What happens to the parts of ourselves that have little room to exist within the roles we are expected to inhabit?

The Heroine’s Journey explores this question through feminine experience: the feelings, desires and contradictions that can remain hidden beneath expectations of composure, consistency and availability.

For Mila Tina, becoming her own heroine meant trusting her voice and giving expression to dimensions of herself she was still learning to understand. Tenderness, anger, pleasure, uncertainty and strength could occupy the same body. Each deserved room in the work.

As the performance developed, Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness offered a framework for understanding and articulating that exploration. The research gave language to questions already taking shape through music and movement: how inherited expectations shape identity, what we learn to conceal, and what it means to acknowledge more of ourselves.

Wholeness, here, allows contradiction. It leaves room for experiences that do not resolve neatly, and asks how our relationships and environments might make space for them, too.

A small rebellion. A playground.

The standing drum arrangement began as a small rebellion. Playing seated, Mila Tina wanted more room to move, to travel with the rhythm and give emotion a physical form.

She assembled her favorite acoustic and electronic percussion instruments into a configuration of her own, positioning the cymbals so that martial arts gestures could carry through into a strike. The setup became her playground: a space shaped around the possibilities of her body, where a movement could become a sound and a sound could set her in motion.

Dance, percussion and martial arts share a physical vocabulary of timing, weight, precision and release. Within this arrangement, those connections become part of the performance. Lighting and video extend its emotional world beyond the instruments, giving the internal journey a larger space to inhabit.

Making room became a physical act: arranging the instruments around the expression she wanted to explore.

Before it had a name.

The work traces its beginnings to April 2, 2016, when OLA of Eastern Long Island’s Soy María, Soy Mujer at Guild Hall invited Mila Tina to portray women’s stories through live drumming, music composition, video and dance.

The set did not yet have a name. That performance marked the beginning of her work as a solo artist and an exploration she would continue developing across different stages and forms.