An immersive, inclusive, and sensory-rich arts project in early-stage development
Laying the foundations for Bouillabaisse 2.0 and beyond

A living, layered space — testing belonging, participation, and creative access.
Early ideas, frameworks, and fragments — in motion.

A gathering. A meal. A moment to imagine what it means to belong.
This is not storytelling. This is story-making — with food, language, technology, and care.

I’m currently immersed in a six-month R&D project exploring what I’m calling Experiential Democracy — a new approach to participatory events shaped by immersive technology, AI, and human presence. At its core is the development of an access ecology framework — where care, creativity, and inclusion are structurally interwoven, not added on.

This page is a living notebook — gathering early tests, frameworks, and fragments in progress.

Jump to:  Project log line | Vision & Questions | Access & Technology as Creative Structure | Group Dynamics & Participation | Phases & Timeline | Want to Connect | Downloadable Versions

Project Logline

Bridging Connections / Bouillabaisse 2.0:
Early-stage development of a sensory-rich, accessible, and barrier-breaking immersive experience—serving a Welsh Bouillabaisse to explore belonging, communication, and connection in a kind, safe environment.

Vision & Questions

Bridging Connections is not about delivering a fixed format. It’s a question.

Can immersive technologies help create conditions for equitable presence, for meaningful co-existence, for shared story-making?

At its heart is a small, sensory-rich banquet — A Serving of Welsh Bouillabaisse — where questions are not just asked, but lived. This is a space to test, feel, and rework the dynamics of presence, participation, and access through real human interaction.

We are exploring:

• How immersive elements can enhance communication without overwhelming or disrupting connection

• How access can be embedded creatively—not as a fix, but as a foundation

• How technology might serve human presence, rather than mask or override it

• How a meal might become a place of encounter—where unfamiliarity is not a threat, but a possibility

This project is not only about the tools — it’s about the emotional, sensory, and political dynamics of group experience. Especially when food is involved.

• Deaf guests may experience “dinner table syndrome”—present, but excluded from the flow of conversation.

• Neurodivergent participants may find communal dining overwhelming or unpredictable.

• People whose identities, languages, or accents are unfamiliar may be judged before they even speak.

• Those less familiar with exclusion may feel fear or discomfort when difference is foregrounded.

I’m not looking for speed or fluency. I’m looking for resonance, relationality, and space to breathe.

Take AI-powered simultaneous translation: it might allow people to speak across languages without the presence of a third-party interpreter. But the voice is often synthetic, borrowed, or flattened. Cadence is lost. Accent erased. The rhythm of thought smoothed over.

What do we lose when communication becomes frictionless?

This R&D is about testing those edges. Not to solve them — but to sit with them. To understand how immersive tech, access, and co-creation might hold each other in generative tension.

It’s an invitation — into shared presence, mutual flexibility, and the possibility of unfamiliar beauty.

Access & Technology as Creative Structure

Access as the form 

Access is not an add-on. It’s the dramaturgy. It shapes how the experience unfolds, who can participate, and how presence is shared.

This project tests how access and technology can be embedded from the start — not as extras, but as creative foundations.

I’m not starting with a fixed form and making it accessible.
I’m starting with access as the form.

Access isn’t layered into the dramaturgy.
Access is the dramaturgy — if we understand dramaturgy not as script, but as the relational architecture of experience. The design of how people come into contact. The choreography of timing, atmosphere, and care.

The work doesn’t begin with a script or staging. It begins with conditions — for presence, participation, and co-creation.

It’s about how the experience holds people, not how it performs at them.

Immersion as Relational Architecture

My background is in immersive, participatory performance — often made outside traditional structures, without a fixed audience-performer divide. That remains the foundation of this work, now expanded through the testing of immersive and assistive technologies.

The Tools We’re Testing

We are experimenting with tools that respond to the needs of those in the room:

• AI-powered simultaneous translation, which can make space for multilingual participation — Urdu, Arabic, Welsh, French, etc. — depending on who is present

• AR captions and BSL smart glasses, offering layered, visual modes of engagement

• Audio-described, captioned, and BSL-interpreted content, integrated with immersive soundscapes and 360° footage

• Flexible formats, designed to shift with the emotional energy and access rhythms of each group

Can immersive technologies help create conditions for equitable presence, for meaningful co-existence, for shared story-making?

What We Might Lose

AI translation might allow two people to speak across languages without relying on a human interpreter. But the voice is often synthetic, borrowed, or flattened — stripped of inflection, cadence, accent. The rhythm of thought is smoothed over. Emotional tone, lost.

When someone speaks in a language not their own, it’s a gesture of respect, a vulnerable offering, an attempt to meet the other. If received with care, that effort becomes a bridge — something real, something felt.

What do we lose when communication becomes frictionless?

I’m not looking for speed or fluency.
I’m looking for resonance, relationality, and space to breathe.

Edges, Possibilities, and Hope

This project is about testing those edges.
Not to solve them — but to understand them better.
To explore what becomes possible when access, participation, and creative technology are held as one.

Imagine this:

A D/deaf guest sits beside a blind or partially sighted individual who speaks English. Across from them, a Welsh speaker chats with their monolingual French or Arabic-speaking partner. Around them, creative textures unfold — through sound, light, rhythm, and gesture. Nothing is flattened. Nothing is reduced. Everyone is met where they are.

This is the hope.
But it is not yet a certainty.

Group Dynamics & Participation

This isn’t a performance. It’s a gathering.

We begin not with content, but with conditions — emotional, sensory, and social — that support shared presence across difference.

Hosting is not neutral. It’s a form of dramaturgy.
It shapes how people arrive, how safety is built, how openness is modelled and maintained.

The group is the content.

Bridging Connections explores how vulnerability, unfamiliarity, and collective rhythm shape the emotional tone of an experience — especially when guests come with different bodies, languages, neurotypes, and life histories.

Some people may find silence spacious.
Others may find it unbearable.
Some want to speak; some want to witness.

No one is required to perform. But everyone is invited to co-create.

Food offers a shared rhythm — a way to anchor the experience in warmth, repetition, and care.

For this R&D phase, we’re testing a scaled-down two-course version of A Serving of Welsh Bouillabaisse — a sensory and relational prototype designed to explore how food can hold emotional tone and invite co-creation.

The full five-course structure is imagined as the heart of Bouillabaisse 2.0, a future phase where each course would offer a distinct mode of engagement — sensory, poetic, reflective, connective, and legacy-focused.

Even in this early pilot, the meal is the dramaturgy — a non-verbal score shaped by texture, pacing, attention, and care.

But food is not neutral.

Eating together can build connection — but it can also provoke anxiety, overwhelm, or discomfort. Especially for guests who are D/deaf, blind or partially sighted, neurodivergent, chronically ill, or culturally displaced — across lines of language, ethnicity, gender expression, or experience.

The emotional dynamics of dining are shaped by many things.
This work is guided by an ethic of intersectionality — holding space for layered identities and lived experience, not through categories, but through attentiveness and design.

We are exploring how:

• Facilitators can tune to emotional tone, not just follow scripts

• Guests can choose their own depth of participation

• Tactile, visual, and poetic tools can support dialogue without pressure

• Consent and timing can create safety for difference to coexist

And later — when the gathering disperses — what remains?

A story, maybe. A shared artefact. A visual and audio echo.
Some form of digital or poetic residue — not to archive the event, but to reflect the emotional imprint it leaves behind.

The group itself becomes the memory.

Phases & Timeline

This R&D phase is not the end point — it’s the groundwork.

Bouillabaisse 2.0 is more than a possibility. It is a fully formed next phase — conceptually ready, dramaturgically mapped, and waiting to be realised. This R&D is not about inventing it from scratch, but about testing its foundations, refining its textures, and gathering the right support to bring it into being.

The vision is clear. What will be needed soon is space, time, and the right partners — financial, creative, and practical — to help carry it forward.

Phase 2: Bouillabaisse 2.0

A full-scale, five-course immersive banquet designed to deepen and expand the concepts tested in the pilot.

Each course becomes a dramaturgical layer — sensory, poetic, reflective, connective, and legacy-focused — drawing from the Participant Prototype Journey and the hosting frameworks developed during the R&D.

This next phase will explore:

• Scaled-up co-creation with new collaborators and participants

• Integrated access tools in a full public setting

• A more formal structure for feedback, witnessing, and emotional holding

• Documentation that captures not just what happened, but how it felt

Phase 3: Scalable Framework

This phase focuses on developing a replicable model that other communities can adapt to host their own feasts of story-making and inclusive gathering.

The model will centre:

• Artistic equity — and, it is hoped, move one step further toward artistic justice

• Multilingual and multi-sensory participation

• Co-creation and care

• Integrated accessibility as a creative foundation

This is not a format to be replicated exactly, but a set of evolving principles for creating inviting, relational spaces through food and performance.

Downloadable Versions

Prefer to read this page offline or in an alternate format?

• Plain text (.txt) — optimal for screen readers, lightweight, and accessible on any device

• Accessible PDF (.pdf) — easy to download, print, or read offline, with a clean linear flow

These  downloadable version were created to support accessibility and offline reading.

You can view the live, evolving version of this page here:
www.cathypiquemal.com/in-development-bridging-connections