JoAnne Ling is a New York based Set Decorator and erstwhile Puppeteer who trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Projects include "The Book of Henry", "Freeheld", "The Dinner", and soon to be released "The Seagull".
The beginning of the collaborative process is two people who speak different languages finding themselves on an island. To get anything done, they have to build something new between them, a common tongue. This requires finding things that resonate with both, and through these weaving together a parlance that has a life of its own, something that feels natural and inevitable, and can then be translated into images.
Things will always get lost in translation. I had a design professor that made everyone draw a giraffe on the first day of class. The truth is, it’s awfully hard to draw a giraffe. The second part of the exercise was revealing our sad attempts, and then breaking into small groups to refine our work and come up with less ridiculous creatures. At this point, it was easier-we were working in groups, so we could pick out the best elements of each drawing and combine them into something less embarrassing. The point was, although we all figure we know what a giraffe looks like, for god sakes, rendering it is a different matter. It would be more accurate to say we know for sure what a giraffe doesn’t look like. Through the somewhat backward process of eliminating the most illogical things and continually winnowing the best bits of our shared work we achieved far better results than anyone’s solo effort.
Given the interdependent nature of our work, it is important to have enough trust in each other to be allowed to get things wrong. Good relationships between decorators and designers allow for a degree of unselfconscious experimentation. I’ll surely offer some things that are off base. I hope this happens early on, since sometimes these “off’ things lead to new ideas we might not have got to otherwise. The best thing designers can do is welcome these occasions and keep talking.
