Christina Patterson: A joyous display to help heal broken lives

"It's hard to read this," said the man on the stage, "because it brings back all the memories." His voice had faded almost to a whisper. "This was 15 years ago, and it still affects me."

The man on stage was a photocopying engineer and he was reading from a book he'd written five years before. The man was Duwayne Brooks, and the book was Steve and Me, a devastating account of the murder of his friend, Stephen Lawrence.

In his sober shirt and tie, he stuck out from all the other performers on that stage but then, he told me, he'd had to rush from work and hadn't had time to get changed. The others were dressed in jeans (baggy for the boys, skin-tight for the girls), T-shirts (baggy for the boys, skin-tight for the girls) and chains.

By this point in the evening, we'd had Jamaican-style rap from Kennington, grime from Camden, red-hot dance moves from all over the place and heart-stopping soul, with a hip-hop backing, from a south London group called the Dropouts. The Dropouts started their set with a film about a young black teenager seeking escape in music. They ended it with a buxom teenager with a voice like Amy Winehouse's telling us that "what we need is some positivity", reminding us that there "is some possibility", and urging the audience, "if you've got a talent, use it".

Not the most sophisticated lyrics, perhaps, but at the Hackney Empire on Thursday night, speaking to a crowd for whom the violence of disaffected youth is not just an item in the papers, it was like a jolt of electricity surging through every nerve in every body on every seat. And when the evening ended, with more grime from a group called the Gutter Goonz, and the declaration that "everyone has their own problems, we've just got to get through", it didn't sound banal. It just sounded true.

The event was the last in a series running under the title (taken from Paul Gilroy's book) There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, a series which aimed to "explore creativity, citizenship and culture by London's next generation of artists". A collaboration between Pan Intercultural Arts and the education department of Asian Dub Foundation, it's the culmination of a project – involving theatre, performance, music and the digital media – that's been running in nine London boroughs for a year.

Among the participants were Deng (stage name "Stamma") and Arnold (stage name "Barztard"). Off stage, Deng, the son of a Sudanese single mother, had a severe stammer, but on stage he rapped at high speed with the best of them. In the green room, Arnold, the son of a Pentecostal Pakistani single mother, confided that he'd been selling drugs, and in constant trouble with the police, when his "mentor" at school told him about the project. He's just taken his GCSEs and thinks he's done "quite well".

Roy was also going through "a bad patch" (his single mother died of diabetes when he was 16) when he stumbled on a youth drama project at the Oval House Theatre. Through playing "a guy who wanted to commit suicide", he decided, he told me, to "take control" of his future. Joining the Pan project as a participant, he is now its assistant director, aiming to develop the participants' "creativity" and "leadership skills". In the autumn, he's off to study directing at drama school.

This inspirational project is one of hundreds across the country – projects involving arts workers (often badly paid, often freelance), youth workers (ditto) and teachers (often stressed to the point of near-insanity by SATs) working on a shoestring, a shoestring that's very often about to snap. The shoestring is generally threaded together from different sources: trusts, foundations, very occasionally, businesses and sometimes, if enough boxes are ticked, the Arts Council. And, of course, any Tom, Dick, Harry or prime minister who can be persuaded to cough up.

Art is not the answer to the problems of a generation of young people who are grappling with poverty, and poor parenting, and terrible schools, and low aspirations, and, yes, racism. A generation, in fact, whose mums, on the evidence of Thursday night, won't (or can't) even come to see them dance or sing, and whose dads, also on the evidence of Thursday night, many of them have never even met. It's not the answer, but it might be part of it. To be good at something, when you've never been visibly good at anything, is not nothing. To have positive support from a peer group, when your teachers have written you off, and your mum's too depressed to talk to you, is not nothing.

Yesterday, I spoke to a young man called Chris Preddy. He was living in a hostel, stealing mobile phones and selling drugs, when his brother was murdered. He met a youth worker, who encouraged him to explore the performing arts. Two years ago, he won the Poetry Society's Rise Poetry Slam. Now, he's doing youth work and studying performing arts. "It was hard at first," he said, "to live in the same area with the same people trying to bring me down."

His cousins, by the way, killed Damilola Taylor. Now that, Mr Obama, Mr Brown and Mr Cameron, is what I call courage.

c.patterson@independent.co.uk

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