By Liz Nicholls,
Here’s a way to have yourself an existential crisis (or at least an emotional breakdown): be a rat, in Alberta.
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When we last met the stars of Rat Academy, a pair of rats on the lam in a rat-free province, Fingers, the starchy, street-wise one, was coaching Shrimp, a naive, distractible lab escapee, on how to survive in a hostile world.
Since the 2023 premiere of Rat Academy at Nextfest and then the Fringe that summer, Batrabbit Collective’s hit duo clown show has been across the country, to festivals far and wide. This week the rodent creations of Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner are back at the festival where they began nearly three years and more than 70 performances ago. At Nextfest Fingers and Shrimp are in a new show, a sequel that stands alone, Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order.
In the course of three years on the road, “it’s grown so much…. We were always discovering new things,” says Hoffmann of the Rat Academy journey. It’s even included the experience of performing for scientists at an invasive species conference in Olds. “Right in the front row there were the people who run the Alberta Rat Patrol,” says Yoner of this unexpected Life/Art meet-up. “They loved it.” And Hoffmann and Yoner have the merch to prove it — posters, stickers, T-shirts with the motto ‘Rat on Rats’.” They’ve been interviewed by a U.K. documentary film maker. Fingers and Shrimp are rodent stars.
“There are only so many bits we can fit into an hour and we needed a place to put them,” says Hoffman, who plays Fingers to Yoner’s Shrimp. “And we were hungry to to build something new, to fill out again!”
Their main inspiration for Gnaw and Order was “us exploring our definitions of home, where we feel safe, how you can build one,” says Yoner. “To the backdrop of the housing crisis and rents going up, the way the new generation thinks of a home space has been forced to change a lot. That was fuel for the show.”
“Dayna and I have been friends for a long time. We’ve lived together in two different places, been roommates in school (they were classmates in the U of A BFA theatre program), then got an apartment after that…. Now we live separately. Dayna is looking at getting a house. I’ve travelled a lot for work.”
Says Hoffmann, “for me as an artist trying to get a mortgage … well, I’m lucky to have relatives who left me money, there aren’t many people in my position who can do that. And I’ve struggled with that feeling.”
Katie Yoner and Dayna Lea Hoffmann in Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order, outside the Fringe Benefit, May 2025. Photo by Marc J Chalifoux
The original Rat Academy leaned into the idea of the rat as misfit, the ultimate outsider marginalized by a hostile culture. For a couple of rats in Alberta, the notion of home and what it means to be at home is particularly equivocal. Are their rights being violated? “Are we entitled to a peaceful existence?” as Hoffmann says of their rodent characters. Face it, rats rights are a nuanced question in a rat-free province.
Rat Academy was always going to be a clown show, the artists say. “And clowns are pieces of ourselves,” says Hoffmann. She and Yoner, are mentees of masters of the craft Michael Kennard (of Mump and Smoot) and Jan Henderson. “Fingers exists somewhere in Dayna; Shrimp exists somewhere in me,” says Yoner. “There are many things we’ll explore in tandem with it, but whatever we create together will always, at the core, be about our friendship with each other.” She laughs. “It’s us as people — with a tail on.”
Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions, Edmonton Fringe 2023
The first show conjured a dangerous world, not least through playfulness with scale. The alley was their Manhattan; the rat trap was gigantic. “And there were mentions of the Rat Patrol,” says Yoner. But the first show largely pursued the internal conflict in the characters.” The challenge with the new show was to retain that friction between the characters, while upping the ante in the external world. “There’s an active oppressor out to get them this time.” Says Hoffmann. “The new dangers are scaled up massively.”
The origins of the imaginative, funny push-pull dynamic between Fingers and Shrimp were at the Fringe in 2021. Fringe director Murray Utas Fringe asked Hoffmann to do a between-show interlude on the outdoor stage with her juggling act (Hoffmann is also trained in the circus arts). “I was very scared and instantly went to Katie…. You’ll be the incompetent juggler and I’ll be the competent one.”
Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Two Pin Idiot. Photo supplied
The first photo of the pair together onstage is a clown show they devised, Two Pin Idiot. And when COVID shut down live performance, Hoffmann developed “a short film about the last rat in Edmonton…. The voice was different, the makeup and facial expression was different, but the core was the same,” says Yoner.
And so “a duo rat show” was born. “Dayna and I discovered we have a natural chemistry onstage.” It’s one that slides naturally into the traditional clown dynamic of higher and lower status, the one that tries to keep the other in line, the other more wayward, more curious, “a little bit stupid,” Yoner laughs.
Says Hoffmann, “this new show is a massive growth for Shrimp, who started as a lab rat who’d never been in the world before … never quite hitting the mark. This time Shrimp is doing a little too well. Fingers teaches Shrimp how to steal but Shrimp takes it one step too far…. The biggest question (this time) is how do they find a home, build a home, fight back?.”
“It’s the world premiere at Nextfest, but it’s very much a work-in-progress,” she says of Gnaw and Order. Which is something valuable that the festivities this week are for: giving artists an opportunity to test their ideas in front of an audience, especially vital for a clown show.
Hoffmann and Yoner emphasize that the Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order we’ll see at the Fringe will be a completely different show,. “We have seven drafts of things we want to include in the Fringe version…. What needs to change? How much bigger can we make this spectacle?”
Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner in Rat Academy, Batrabbit Productions. 2023 photo supplied.
Nextfest has figured prominently in their development as indie artist/producers and their hit characters, from a 20-minute test version with no real audience interaction (except eye contact) at the Play The Fool Festival. “We were very scared of talking to the audience. And now we have such a relationship with them. The audience is another character!” says Yoner. “It’s one of my favourite parts, interacting,” says Hoffmann. “All of that we got from doing that first show at Nextfest. It broke us out out of our shells!” And Rat Academy “turned into a show that you can’t do without an audience,” and a bona fide hit.
The pair are fulsome in their praise of the festival and its supportive director Ellen Chorley. And not just for the $10,000 or so worth of technical and management support that come with doing a Nextfest mainstage show. “Excellent technicians, an absolutely phenomenal theatre space, an audience!” says Yoner. “Everything we needed to find out more about the show we were creating…. An opportunity we could not have created ourselves.”
“It’s a fantastic atmosphere to create something new. They really set you up well for that!
PREVIEW
Nextfest 2025
Rat Academy 2: Gnaw And Order
Theatre: Batrabbit Collective
Created by and starring: Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner
Directed by: Joseph McManus
Where: Nancy Power Theatre at the Roxy, 10708 124 St.
Running: June 8, 10, 12, 14
Tickets: theatrenetwork.ca
