Welcome
‘Useful’ can seem a loaded word when it is applied to the arts. Benjamin Britten, in the utilitarian years after the Second World War, felt that music should be of use to ‘ordinary people’, establishing an ethos that has permeated the work of opera companies around Britain ever since. ‘Usefulness’ led to ‘outreach’, ‘accessibility’, and now ‘engagement’. At its worst, this has created a culture of boxticking, with nebulous and sometimes patronising projects devised primarily to satisfy funding bodies. At its best, however, the urge to be useful has resulted in an extraordinary flowering of work aimed at schools, young people and communities on the fringes of society whose lives are enriched by an encounter with the world of creativity and self-expression.