Becoming Artists: Collective Reflection of Personal Experience in Community Theater

The article examines how the participants of a six-week community theater project inHelsinki (2015–16) become socialized into the role of Artist by the professional leadersof the project. One of the main goals of the project was to explore the“joint voice”of theethnically and socioeconomically diverse group and to make that voice heard in society.Drawing on ethnographic data, the article focuses on a central writing technique that wasused to scan the participants’past experiences and to rewrite them into ingredients ofthe joint voice. The article argues that the process of socialization involves a comprehensiveepistemological transformation that gives rise to changes in the participants’perception oftheir experiences. The epistemological structure that regulates the writing activities per-tains both to principles of entextualization (i.e., how personal experiences become trans-formed into textual patterns) and to rules of interpersonal engagement (i.e., how others’contributions are treated). Thus, it enables the construction of safe and effective channelsalong which private experiences canflow to the group’s collective discursive space and on-ward to the public.