Shay Mace
There are few people with as fascinating stories to tell an audience than Michael Anderson, a Boston-based Trade Union Lawyer who has spent the past few years protesting weekly outside of the ICE headquarters in Massachusetts, and confronting ICE paramilitaries with a troupe of Anarchist clowns and quotes from Tom Paine. He’s bringing equal amounts of chaos and politics to his upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe solo show Elvis in Chaos, a multimedia romp through the multiverse and its infinite possibilites across history. With plenty to talk about, we caught up with Michael for a pixelated pint to unpack the show.
You can catch Elvis in Chaos at Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street on August 7th – 15th from 17:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Shay: Hi Michael! Your upcoming EdFringe spoken word show explores alternate ‘Elvis timelines’, quantum physics, and some of the big moments in history – for those who might be confused, tell us how you manage to weave those things together.
Michael: I want my audience to come unstuck in Time. So, I have to disrupt their internal metronomes. I hit them from the start with hallucinatory fireworks, mind-bending fractal GIFs driven through a PowerPoint clicker. If I can hypnotise them, I don’t need to explain the connections further.
Joe Strummer said “the future is unwritten” — which could be the motto of the show. I tell insane chaos-theory stories: Elvis’ life pivoted on his two-second eye contact with my mom / the casting of the Monkees caused the Khmer Rouge / bagpipes caused the Black Death. Hahaha until I make it PLAUSIBLE. I talk about anarchy and desire with my mouth full of Oreos, about how the constellation Orion is modern art, about how the best gods are the naughty ones, Shiva, Loki, Exu. All this weaves together once the audience locks in on what I’m saying. If we really do live in an expanding Multiverse, then we create the world just by living in it. That’s a radical anarchist idea, as well as the central insight of quantum physics.
Shay: You have quite the fascinating background, having worked organising against mass deportations by ICE in the United States recently in what’s been quite the storied career. Tell us about what’s led you to EdFringe this year, and how it has impacted your performing career.
Michael: I got the nerve to do Fringe because it’s a petri dish for strange new genres like mine. I’ve been a wandering nomad in the various performance scenes here: too intellectual for comedy, too irreverent for poetry, too manic for storytelling, too conversational for theatre. I dislike the label “Spoken Word” – as opposed to what? Mime? Coming to Fringe is risky, expensive and ambitious, but it’s all worth it if I find audiences who will let me communicate with them in a new way. Visuals let me get much deeper intellectually than simple spoken word. If I can say things creatively at the frontier of my own understanding, and bring a Fringe audience along with me, I achieve absolute bliss.
Shay: All the proceeds of this Pay What You Can Show will be going to support immigrant defence networks in Boston – tell us about your links there and what the audience’s money will be funding.
Michael: I run No Fear Street Theater, a weekly protest of actors and poets outside ICE headquarters in Massachusetts. We support LUCE, a growing mutual-aid network that raises bond money, refers lawyers, and helps families find, track and communicate with detained loved ones. Supporting LUCE builds the infrastructure that defeated ICE in Minneapolis and Portland: hotlines to track ICE, directing flash mobs to surround ICE raids with whistling crowds, public mobilisation for huge non-violent protest. If and when ICE surges in Boston, there will be thousands of anxious liberals wringing our hands “I wish I could help, but I don’t know what to do!”. Mutual-aid networks like LUCE give us something to do: you patrol this elementary school with a whistle and a cellphone, you go take these groceries to families hiding in their homes, you make enormous papier-mache puppets to loom over our protest marches. Giving money now makes the spontaneous resistance of a whole city possible.
Shay: What will be the first thing the audience sees, feels, and hears as they enter the space?
Michael: They will see a stunning animation of a Lorenz attractor – the double-pinwheel icon of chaos theory, made of interlocking cyclones of thousands of particles, with a phased series of Elvises dissolving in, to a soundtrack of Elvis tribute singer The King singing Led Zeppelin Whole Lotta Love. They will feel like they are coming unstuck in time, understanding from the opening hallucination that past, present and future telescoped into one moment, the split-second choices Elvis made in deciding who he was going to be.
Shay: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?
Michael: I want them dazed and confused. I want them to gasp for air, like they’ve been dunked too long at a baptism. I want them to giggle and retell my jokes even as they linger in the dream state of the show. I want them to feel like their brains have been gently hacked – they clicked on my harmless comedy which opened an .exe file that reprogrammed their brains.They’ll be all shook up. They’ll wonder which branch of the Multiverse they are waking up in, looping back in time, returning to sender. Their suspicious minds will be lonesome tonight, not knowing why they now understand quantum physics, but realizing that’s all right, mama.
Shay: What journey has the show been on to find itself at EdFringe 2026?
Michael: I’m stumbling on a new genre with PowerPoint – it’s like interactive film-making. I can manipulate transitions, animations, embedded sound and video, flinging images at them every few seconds. This lets me communicate with the audience on two parallel tracks, both with my voice and my thumb on a PowerPoint clicker. I figure Fringe audiences will be open to that kind of propaganda.
Shay: With EdFringe now just around the corner, what are you most excited for?
Michael: I’m excited to go to other cool shows, watch them, applaud, and then exit-flyer the departing audience. It’s a self-selecting way to focus my publicity. Audiences at the shows that I love will be, by definition, precisely the people most likely to be interested in my show.
Shay: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
Michael: The bar would have to be in Amsterdam, where my show would be shots of cannabis-infused tequila, to induce an out-of-body trance state that also supports Latino immigrants. Straight up, no ICE.
A reminder, you can catch Elvis in Chaos at Lime Studio at Greenside @ George Street on August 7th – 15th from 17:15 (60mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
