Opening Plenary: 2021 Pacific Northwest Labor Association Conference
Channel: Pacific Northwest Labor History Association
Date: 2021-08-04

Opening Night Plenary 
Welcome and Introduction               
Presenters:
Tom Lux, Pacific Northwest Labor History Association President               
Jo Blake, King County Coalition of Labor Union President

Keynote: Elise Bryant: “We Did Not Come This Far To Turn Back Now”
Elise Bryant launched her labor arts career as the artistic director of the University of Michigan’s labor theatre project, Workers’ Lives/Workers’ Stories in 1982.  She joined the National Writers Union and began her screenwriting career with a script for the documentary, Porgy and Bess: an American Voice, which aired last year on PBS. 
Elise wrote and directed three plays produced by the Performance Network in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Common Ground Theatre Ensemble: “Workin’ for Living,” “River Dreams,” and “The Zoo Zoo Chronicles.” In 1998, Elise made her Washington, DC stage debut in Theatre J’s production of Goodnight Irene and founded the DC Labor Chorus. She directed two productions of the labor jazz opera, Forgotten, in Detroit and in the Washington, DC area (see www.forgottenshow.net). In 2017, Elise directed the debut of a new labor jazz opera, Love Songs from the Liberation Wars, which also opened to rave reviews. She is currently working on an autobiographical one-woman show entitled, “Queen of the Night.”
After working 35 years as a labor educator, Elise retired from her professorship at the National Labor College to start her own consulting service, the E.L.I.S.E. Consortium.  Her areas of expertise include Communication Skills, Effective Committee Training, Leadership Training, Teaching Techniques, Labor History and Culture, Diversity Training, Organization Development and “Arts as a Tool for Organizing”. Elise currently serves as the executive director of the Labor Heritage Foundation, a non-profit organization that is the “art and soul of the labor movement.”

Elise is a member of the AFM Local 1000 as well as CWA/Newspaper Guild Local 32035. In 2012, she received the Lifetime Achievement award from the United Association of Labor Educators. In 2017, she became president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) and a month later was elected vice-president of CWA/TNG Local 32031.


Video and Songs: Solidarity Notes Labour Choir 
The Solidarity Notes Labour choir has been in existence since the year 2000, and has been involved in many of the resistance struggles in the city since that time. We’ve also traveled to Cuba and San Francisco, sung on many picket lines and raised funds for many worthy causes.
In 2020, to celebrate our 20th year of existence, we produced a video telling some of the stories of the choir’s work during those 20 years, and released it Jan 30 th as a fundraiser for Downtown East Side Response and for us (we raised $2061 for DTES response!) We propose to show you that video, which ends with a “quarantune” version of us singing one of our standards. If it works out, we’ll also have another quarantune available for public consumption...and we won’t rule out the possibility that a performance together might be recorded outside....

The Solidarity Notes Labour Choir is a group of activists who know that music is more than pleasurable sound. It’s a powerful language to educate and connect us and remind us of our strength and history. Throughout history, struggles for labour and human rights have produced music that inspires and reconnects us to hope and possibility.  Our repertoire consists of labour songs and songs of social justice. The songs balance a sense of history with a desire to sing and inspire the movements of today. We sing songs from past centuries to the present. We look around the world for inspiration. Usually we sing in English, but we’ve also sung in French, Spanish, Yiddish, Arabic, Mandarin, Zulu and Tagalog.
We perform on picket lines, at rallies, conventions, conferences, memorials, and benefits – wherever our music can contribute to social progress. In 2019 we participated in a celebration of Burnaby labour history with a performance at the Burnaby museum, including a song written for that event about the Shull lumber mill strike in the early 1930s.
We have sung with Utah Phillips at the Vancouver International Folk Festival, with the Seattle Labour Chorus at the Paul Robeson Memorial Concert, for Fidel Castro in Cuba, at the Western Workers Heritage Labour Festival in San Francisco, at the Pacific Northwest Labor History’s Association’s Wobbly Festival in Seattle, at the Princeton Traditional Music Festival in Princeton, BC and at Miners’ Memorial Day in Cumberland, BC. However, we are most commonly found singing in Vancouver, on picket lines, at peace marches, demonstrations, memorials and social justice benefits.