Improviser Metaphor

Prepare your offers as if you were a chef preparing the ingredients of a meal. Your carrots, for example, represent an offer you are about to make, and the meal is the scene. You get to decide how you should prep your ingredients before you present them. What kind of thought do you want to put into your offers? With improvisation you can become a chef who, while following the right path, may be able to chop more and more swiftly and precisely until eventually you just look at the carrots and they fucking cut themselves into perfectly cubed pieces and you didn’t even mean to. The trained improv mind will minimize the time needed for choice consideration and impulse checking before the line is delivered. This minimization relates to the time it takes to cut the vegetable; the time needed to be safe cutting near your fingers while holding the tool steady. The untrained mind is erratic displaying various levels of severity, which could range from the chef slashing the carrots wildly to throwing them in whole without rinsing to slicing their finger and giving up on the offer or the scene or themselves.

Your scene partner is your co-chef in the kitchen, occupying the same level of hierarchy with no difference in status. You build the meal together. Of course, in the scene you would have characters that would have varying levels of status, sometimes similar sometimes not, but person to person, regardless of skill level or experience, the players, as people, as chefs, should be equal in status. Line by line you build the scene, you cook the meal. 

Your combined outspoken lines of dialogue make the scene; they are your meal finalization and delivery. Playing a show is like creating many different meals for many people with, depending on the show, a plethora of co-chefs.

Also, this metaphor is not recommended for permanence as having a healthy variety of processes for thought and action while improvising will positively impact ones play and ones heart. Experimenting in your kitchen, finding new recipes and improving your ingredients will yield new lines, new laughs, and renewed interest. Find ingredients that are satisfying, that people appreciate and avoid the stale ingredients or the ones that taste good immediately but eventually make you feel like shit.

How do you want to operate in the kitchen? What’s your process?