A tech start-up company is pitching a product proposal for a “human upgrade” to a panel of venture capitalists. As the pitch unfolds, a surreal hall of mirrors emerges, escalating into a visual and sonic choral cacophony unveiling the gendered, racialized lens of the white cis male dominating the tech world, whose performative optics claim "client-facing" diversity and inclusion. ELEVATOR reveals how “the pitch” promotes the morphing of personhood and product, pushing the viewer to question the ethics of creation.

ELEVATOR draws from our experiences as artists and entrepreneurs who are continually asked to engage with the ritual of pitching. This work examines the start of the entrepreneurial journey as an entry to our capitalist system, which not only influences how we run businesses, but also how we live our lives and structure our communities. The performance explores tech start-up culture for its underlying inequities and embodiment of capitalist extremes - idealism, competition, and ego. In our COVID reality, our dependence upon technology has accelerated exponentially, elevating the privilege and inequity of the tech industry, leaving us unaware of how deeply this culture influences and surveils our lives without our knowledge or permission.