Tell No One – New York City’s Next Immersive Storytelling Experience

New York City has always been the figurehead that thrives on the realms of the unseen and unspoken, hiding away whispers behind velvet curtains, offering hazy encounters in dimly lit rooms, and beating the vibrant pulse of creativity that pierces through every hidden doorway and alleyway. This tingling energy of living and breathing art has enabled it to become one of the leading cities in immersive installations, repurposing underground spaces to bring the hidden worlds to life, merging art with reality and pushing us to question our very notions of artistic expression and experience. 

Tell No One, the newest immersive event by New York City’s trailblazing creative collective CX, steps boldly into that lineage, re-tracing the ritual theatre of Sleep No More into the shadowy underground art venues of Brooklyn warehouses. Its spirit is reincarnated inside the labyrinthine McKittrick building, the latest experiment in live connection that transforms six floors into an aesthetic world that blurs the line between exhibition, performance, and intimacy. Expounding the universe of Tell No One lays bare a visceral history of the immersive scene in New York City, and how the act of immersion is central to the city’s cultural heartbeat. 

The McKittrick as Living Myth

The McKittrick Hotel in itself has long been a long-standing cathedral of sensory theatre. Its walls carry the faint echoes of masked wanderers and cinematic dreamscapes of yesteryear, a place where audiences have always been invited to a show of unequivocal immersion and imagination. Tell No One duly continues that historic tradition, but gives this McKittrick heritage a modern twist by turning the invitation towards rediscovering the core of human connection. Speaking at Tell No One’s press preview, CX’s founder William Etundi Jr. calls the event “an invitation to get off our phone screens and really connect with people in real life, in real spaces.”

To step inside Tell No One is therefore to enter a concealed realm of red velvet and hushed candlelight, where sensuality and curiosity become immediate experiences to inhabit and embody, embracing the ethos of epicurean exploration in its most raw and sensual form. “We were really looking for quality artists but in an edgy, sexy kind of way,” says Rose Alice, CX’s Head Curator, who was also present at the  “Every single person will leave with something different.”

A City That Breathes in Immersion

Historically, immersive art in New York has always represented an act of rebellion, an expression in refusing to sit still and succumbing to the banalities of passive consumption.   From the avant-garde cabarets of the downtown 1980s to the multi-sensory labyrinths of the 2010s, these projects have urged audiences to go beyond consuming art, to feel and immerse themselves fully in its reality.

During the 1970s, state-of-the-art events at The Kitchen and SoHo lofts dared to break down the barrier between artist and audience, thus re-imagining the space of art from an act of watching into a mode of participation. Later, in the 1990s and early 2000s, spaces like PS1 (now known as MoMA PS1) and the tunnels and vaults beneath the Brooklyn Bridge hosted site-specific installations where light, fashion, architecture and sound installations defied the very meaning of art exhibitions. And then we arrive in the 2010s, where Sleep No More redefined the genre for a whole new generation, combining its noir aesthetic and masked anonymity to give audiences a newfound freedom that was beginning to wither in our virtually driven world. 

Today’s Scene

Tell No One gladly carries this exact spirit forward, merging the theatricality of performance art with the communal euphoria of the city’s immense creative heritage.

Etundi’s nod to the legendary club Twilo is another salute to this outstanding legacy of forerunning immersive art. “We are building off the history of Twilo, big sound system, big beautiful dance party,” he says proudly. The event’s dual floors of music that are powered by newly installed sound systems clearly evoke that history, reviving the collective release of rhythm and movement in an almost lost act of expression and agency.

“It comes from wanting to bring people together for conversation, for connection, and for catharsis,” Etundi explains. “We want to be a place where all of that polarization melts away, where people of all types mix, mash together, and cross lines they didn’t know they could cross.”

The Aesthetics of the Forbidden

Visually, Tell No One is an opulent dreamscape of hedonism, an unfiltered red-light district of the imagination. Velvet-covered columns, antique lamps, and flickering candelabras call back to fin-de-siècle salons, while upstairs gardens and wellness areas offer restoration and replenishment. Across six floors, circus performers, shibari artists, and sensual installations lure us into a majestic dialogue with desire and self-exploration.

This fine duality delicately situates Tell No One in the extravagant continuum of immersive art, challenging our own emotional and physical boundaries and the very perception of self. It asks with bold poise and presence: what happens when the line between art and audience dissolves completely? Where do I begin, and where does the art stop?

An Evergreen City of Experience

To speak of Tell No One is to speak of the soul of New York itself, paying homage to a city that continually leads the way in re-thinking how people gather, watch and participate in art. From the avant-garde experiments of The Wooster Group in the 1970s experimental theatre scene to the ballroom voguing houses of Harlem that paved the way for black and queer socio-cultural empowerment, the narrative thread is always the same, namely, using art as a form of real-time expression and immediate experience.

In a time when social connection often feels disembodied and isolated, Tell No One fully feels like a return to something primal that has been dormant for a while. It’s partaking in the shared thrill of the unexpected and unpredictable. As CX Head Curator Rose Alice notes, “People are really desperate for live things. Not just going for a drink, but having some place to go that’s creative is so important.”

And that’s perhaps the secret at the heart of the McKittrick story. Every door leads to a new window of rediscovery, and every interaction is a meeting with unbridled immersion and unbelievable sensation. For one night or two, the audience becomes its own story and its own work of art.