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Hello Highwire Community,Thank you for your candid feedback regarding our decision to include and endorse Matt Besser as a special guest judge for the final match of the March Madness of Improv festival.  Listening to the community is something you should always expect from us, and we are glad you felt like you could speak up. We heard your feedback via multiple channels - email, on Facebook posts announcing the event, and we talked to several of you directly, and we reflected on the decision ourselves in a way that we should have earlier in this process.  This post will…

Hello everyone!Last week we removed the video recording and post for an improv set that appeared on our channel, in response to feedback about the content of the set and our subsequent review. We wanted to make a post about this because it’s important both to be transparent and to recognize that even when there are best intentions, improv is an art form with an increased risk of causing harm due to its spontaneous nature.  That risk implies an obligation for us all to put in work to protect the community and repair when things go wrong, big or small. …

As part of our continued investment in community work towards anti-racism and anti-oppression, Highwire Improv is excited to announce two training programs to be delivered by the amazing team at Hollaback! Using Implicit Bias Training to Investigate Improv Exercises Beginning with the Hollaback! Implicit Bias training program on May 3rd, Highwire will facilitate a collaborative effort among up to 50 improv instructors to breakdown and investigate common improv warmups and exercises. We will use the tools learned during the Hollaback! training program to identify both: How these exercises can lead to bad outcomes without implicit bias awareness.How these exercises can…

It needs to be that easy - Fridays are for Black improv. Highwire Improv is a Baltimore organization. For those of us who know us only online, Baltimore, Maryland is one of the Blackest cities in the United States, with a Black population of more than 60%. For anyone (online or not), you probably already know that improv has rarely represented that fact - at Highwire, in Baltimore, or really anywhere. One thing we decided early on was that we had a responsibility to work towards changing this, and not incrementally though focus groups, or strategic planning, but with constant…

Part of Highwire Improv’s series ‘Important Stuff Most People Find Boring’ The internet is surprisingly full with websites and forums discussing conflict-of-interest policies for non-profit organizations (like Highwire Improv).  There are three reasons for this: The IRS requires non-profit organizations to have a conflict-of-interest policy.Legal things are detailed and complicated.Most people don’t want to deal with that so they copy/paste the IRS’s example policy and use that, and then get shocked when they actually need the policy.  It turns out that thinking about important, ambiguous, situations before they happen is a good idea! Like many things associated with non-profit policy,…

Recently we got some helpful feedback that it was unclear how we might use the data requested in our Show Submission form - specifically the names and identity groups of cast members. Two of Highwire Improv's core values are transparency and action - in the interest of both we wanted to immediately add this post detailing why we ask for this information and how we expect to use it. If that changes, we'll update this page (see the table at the bottom). Why We Ask For Identifying Information In our Show Submission form, we ask groups to list the names…