Back to school at Rosebud School of the Arts

By Laureen F. Guenther Times Contributor

Rosebud School of the Arts (RSA) starts a new year Sept. 4, welcoming eight new students and 20 returning students, who will jump into orientation week with events such as a welcome potluck and campfire, an Amazing Race, and a word and story event.
Paul Muir, the school’s education direction, said last year was full of students’ growth and success.
The first-year class created and performed Follow the Sun, a black light movement piece that was so successful, RSA plans to tour it to middle and high schools, and teachers’ conventions this coming year.
Second-year students performed two successful plays, an L.M. Montgomery Christmas play, and a Comic Con-themed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.
Third- and fourth-year students grew through performing and working backstage in Rosebud Theatre productions, and each fourth-year student produced and performed a Final Project.
RSA also faced significant financial challenges this year, Muir said, and that’s a challenge they’re always working to overcome.
The coming school year will be chock-full of exciting events. RSA will host the ROSAs on Sept. 30, graduating six fourth-year students, and celebrating awards and scholarships for many others.
The first-year movement class will miss instructor Deanne Bertsch, who’s taking a break, but Muir said he looks forward to what instructor Julie Funk will bring to the class and to the movement performance they’ll give in spring.
The second-year students will perform The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, in November and December.
Again, many of the third and fourth year students will be involved in Rosebud Theatre productions, and each of the seven fourth-year students will produce a Final Project, starting in November, with Mikayla Whitehouse’s production of the Canadian play, Prophecy.
In December, there will be Christmas in Alberta, Rosebud’s annual fundraiser in collaboration with Heritage Park.
And Muir is pleased two transfer students from Crandall University in New Brunswick are new members of the RSA student body. They’ll study in Rosebud for a year, earning a minor in theatre studies.
In everything, Muir said, RSA’s tagline is, “Be transformed. Transform culture.”
Helping students grow is like nurturing plants in a garden, Muir said. “A good garden has to be given a certain amount of freedom and wildness, and at the same be pruned and weeded, and nurtured and watered. There has to be a significant measure of freedom. We believe that our freedom comes from Christ.”
RSA has a student life manual with clear conduct expectations, he said, but within that there is a lot of freedom.
“We really want students to come and have a full experience to be free,” he said. “Our journeys are mostly messy. And it’s in the messiness of that journey that I think God has the opportunity to work in our lives and create opportunities for growth and transformation.”
Students’ growth and transformation is RSA’s measure of success, Muir said, whether it happens in the classroom, on stage, in church or in their personal lives.
“They are the transformations where we actually get to see someone, who maybe has felt bound up or has felt oppressed, or just tied up somehow, take that step to be fully transparent, fully present, fully authentic and vulnerable, and share their story.”