About

Making It Last
Animal Survival
Physical Survival
Emotional Survival
Spiritual Survival

In Making It Last, their second collaboration, Kim X Knowlton and Maggie Siena examined
survival – literally, making life last. The performance, comprised of four sections, presented
survival on four levels.

At the time, Maggie was attending New York University as a History major, and Kim was a
graduate of Cornell University in Geology. The two women found common ground in their
first level of investigation, animal survival. This theoretical layer was inspired by the writings
of Charles Darwin and, more specifically, the concept of natural selection – survival of the
fittest.

The next two levels looked at the physical and emotional planes of survival. Subjects of the
physical level included a survivor of a plane crash and a homeless man – people amid life
and death struggles. Emotional Survival featured the victim of a bad relationship and the
long crawl to happiness. Spiritual Survival, the final section, was represented by the question:
do souls go on after death?

Peter Dodge, a composer and musician living in Ithaca, New York, wrote original music for
the piece. Kim met Peter at Cornell, where they had previously collaborated on several
projects.

More than in Our Secret Little Ritual, Kim and Maggie’s first piece, this work made greater use
of the techniques that they had been exposed to while creating and performing Iris Rose’s
House of Janhke and Of Little Women. Maggie remembers it as a “more serious attempt.”
However, as in their previous performance, the women wanted humor to be a main
ingredient. A comedic highlight of the section expressing emotional persevervance was the
women dancing the pony to Nancy Sinatra’s recording of “These Boots Are Made for
Walking.”

Making It Last ran approximately ten minutes and was performed to a tape that ran
continually for most of the show, consisting of both narration and music. Spoken text for
Animal Survival was taken directly from Darwin’s The Origin of Species. The following section,
focusing on physical fortitude, was accompanied by Dodge’s original music and was the
only section that included live dialogue, developed from documented conversations of an
Andean airplane crash survivor and a New York man living on the street. Emotional Survival
was performed to Nancy Sinatra songs along with recorded copy from her album’s liner
notes. The last section had neither soundtrack nor spoken lines.

The only two performances of Making It Last were both in 1985, the same year they
premiered their first work together.