Repeated filmed images of an African-American woman draped in a star-spangled parachute dress scaling the mast of the replica Amistad slave ship, and of beaches, a river fisherman and a dessert array accompanied the reading of the poem "The Buffet Dream" at "BOP: The North Star" at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Feb. 3.

The event featured poems by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Cornell associate professor of English, and three films by Emilie Stark-Menneg '06. Each film was based on one Van Clief-Stefanon's poems.

Following the performance, a discussion focused on issues regarding race and identity in America.

"I'm taking this black woman's words and her voice and sort of seeing how they resonate in my body, but I'm white so it's a very interesting conflict," said Stark-Menneg. "I feel like I'm approaching Lyrae's identity yet still staying who I am at the same time."

Van Clief-Stefanon said her collaboration with Stark-Menneg began when they started "talking about art and race and how difficult it can be to have a conversation with someone without all of everything getting in the way of people actually understanding each other."

Both artists discussed how they wish to portray the black and white woman as similar but different individuals capable of walking in each other's shoes. Van Clief-Stefanon pointed out that mixing their art forms "shows the possibility of conversation if we do talk to each other; instead of just saying, 'Well my way is the way of looking at it.'"

Van Clief-Stefanon noted that Stark-Menneg's artistic direction and interpretation of her poems does not illustrate them, but instead "breaks the poems open in new ways." As for the repeated image of the blue parachute dress, she said, "It became a hunger for America and a hunger for freedom and a hunger for the sky and a hunger for everything ... I would not have come up with that."

Stark-Menneg said she was attracted to Van Clief-Stefanon's poems because she feels that "the way [Van Clief-Stefanon] grapples with this idea of the self and something like oblivion, this containing the self and exploding the self at the same time."

To capture this feeling in the film's images, Stark-Menneg said she traveled down the U.S. East Coast and through Louisiana and Mississippi.

"I had the poems in the back of my head the whole time," she said, "but I was also just exploring the landscape and the people that I came across."

She said that she hopes to challenge society and get people to "really start to question ideas of identity and what it means to be an American."

Elizabeth Simpson '14 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.