Ola Skanks: Delayed Recognition of a Dance Artist Ahead of Her Time

This essay chronicles my research relationship with choreographer, teacher, educator, and activist Ola Skanks. Canadian-born and of West Indian (St. Lucia and Barbados) descent, Skanks was a groundbreaking dance and fashion design artist who combined modern, Western art forms with traditional dances of the Africa diaspora. I share excerpts from my work to date, including my archival exhibition, It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970, to provide context for the circumstances that Black people danced in, socially and/or as performers. This is followed by a selection of photos from Skanks’s archival collection that illustrate the scope of her creative and community contributions. In conclusion, I offer a transcription of a speech I gave when Skanks was inducted into the Dance Collection Danse’s 2018 Encore! Dance Hall of Fame, alongside some of Canada’s most well-known dance artists and community builders. I detail some of the highlights of my meetings with her and also the profundity of the delayed recognition of a woman so far ahead of her time.

Music and Baseball Talks at Cooperstown

This chapter summarizes seven public music theory presentations at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Topics include Charles Ives’s sketches and completed music about baseball and ballplayers, the popular song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a seminar on historical and contemporary baseball music, Casey at the Bat for band and narrator, major league walk-up and entrance music, and branding ball clubs through music. The chapter describes ways to draw musical meaning from music analysis as a fulfilling way for music theorists to connect their work with public audiences through engagement with music from specific social and cultural contexts. These approaches involve both concert music and contemporary popular music and include music that illustrates or celebrates baseball situations as well as music heard at ballparks.

Union Activism and the Baseball Hall of Fame Voting Process: Labor-Management Conflict and Media Bias

Media bias is well documented in the industrial relations domain. This paper extends this research by exploring whether union participation among former professional baseball players affects the likelihood of moving through two stages of the selection process for the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF), a selection process controlled by sports media. At the HOF ballot inclusion stage, union activism increased position players’ and pitchers’ likelihoods of inclusion, regardless of time period. Conversely, at the HOF voting stage, position players who were union representatives during labor-management conflict (i.e., strikes and lockouts) received significantly less votes than non-activists, while position players who were representatives during labor-management cooperation received significantly more votes. Union activism did not affect pitchers at this stage. We conclude that union activists can be subject to negative media bias during labor-management conflict that, in turn, negatively affects post-employment outcomes.