For those of you who don’t know us, we are Katie and Dayna. Six years ago, we moved in together as strangers after our mutual friends invited us to live together in a rental house full of actors. We hit it off, and after we moved out, we continued to live together for two more years and made a whole lot of weird art; Rat Academy was one of those projects. The characters you are about to see on stage are inspired by our friendship and Alberta’s anti-rat history.

For anyone who wasn’t here with us at Nextfest in 2023, this was where Rat Academy had its first full-length premiere after debuting a 20-minute version at the 2022 Play the Fool Festival. We had originally planned to repeat the 20-minute performance until our mentor said, “They’ve already seen that, challenge yourselves to do something new”. We threw the entire story out and decided to focus our performance on a style that terrified us – acknowledging the audience. After a harrowing two weeks (eek!) of development and rehearsal, and with collaboration from our incredible director, Joseph McManus, we presented Rat Academy – In Progress. That show was markedly different from the one you are about to see today. We created many strange bits that never ended up sticking, but some moments from that show are now a staple in the work we do. It was from the in-progress performance that we developed street interviews and created the style of audience interaction that is now crucial to our clowning style.

Following Nextfest, we presented the hour-long version of Rat Academy at Edmonton Fringe. The show went on to tour Fringes across Canada, garnered several awards, and has had over seventy performances for over 8,000 audience members over three years! We even had an opportunity to perform for the real Rat Patrol at the Alberta Invasive Species Conference in 2025.

This run is a love letter to the Edmonton theatre community and a testament to all that Nextfest and the staff at Theatre Network have done for us. Canonically, Fingers and Shrimp belong to Edmonton and live on Whyte Avenue behind The Buckingham, so it feels fitting to present the show again here after we have learned and grown immensely as touring artists over these last three years. What a joy it is to be doing what you love with the people you love! We are so grateful that you’ve come out to see the show, which is a celebration of our friendship and our twisted little minds. If you’re curious, we are no longer roommates (but we do live in the same apartment building).

Thank you for supporting this show, in every iteration.

-Dayna and Katie