When audiences enter the Folsom Street Foundry for the hip-hop dance production “Fray,” they might want to download and play the mobile game “Fray Jam” while they wait for the show to start.

The game isn’t just thematically and aesthetically connected to the stage show; in “Fray,” two young brothers design a game, and “Fray Jam” is supposed to be that game. Call it preshow audience engagement, but of a meta-theatrical, transmedia sort — an approach that’s much more attuned to how young audiences actually behave than are the standard enrichment activities of writing a phrase on an index card and affixing it to a bulletin board.

And after the show, if an audience member connects to “Fray,” which kicks off the spring arts season with a run Wednesday-Friday, March 22-24, in such a way that they want to go deeper, they can download a separate, much more involved (and still in-development) PC game. That game, also called “Fray,” is designed by Barcelona developer Herobeat Studios. In this version, the brothers from the in-person stage show become avatars who solve dance-related puzzles.

This whole single-narrative, three-media vision is what CandyBomber Productions, founded in 2018 by Kate Duhamel, is all about.

Duhamel, who lives in San Francisco, fell into making dance films in 2010 by combining a background in cable TV, a fondness for writing and a fandom of dance dating to her childhood in small-town Iowa. Around the same time, she began serving on the board of directors with dance companies, including Lines Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. That came partly out of an interest in broader philosophical questions: “Where are these art forms going? How are they going to continue to engage younger audiences? They were all worried about audiences aging,” she told The Chronicle.

After about a decade of service on various boards, “I basically just got to the point of, ‘They aren’t ready to really do things differently,’ ” she said. She blamed long-term commitments, including large pipelines of work already commissioned, the need to plan seasons years in advance, as well as large overhead and institutional structure.

“I really felt like, as a dance lover, there's just a massive audience out there that never sees this art form,” she continued. “They're not going to come into the (War Memorial) Opera House and have this uncomfortable and expensive evening of watching an art form that they really don't understand very well.”

Asked for comment, San Francisco Ballet provided a statement saying: “While it’s true that large scale arts organizations have a harder time shifting directions as quickly as smaller organizations, S.F. Ballet has always been an innovator,” adding that its new Artistic DirectorTamara Rojo“理解留住忠诚的非盟的必要性diences while at the same time building programming that represents and attracts new audiences.”

As Duhamel’s frustration grew, she decided, “I'm just going to go over here and do this one-night experiment and show everybody what I'm talking about.” The result was CandyBomber’s first show,“Fury,”inspired by the film “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

To translate dance to new, younger audiences, Duhamel believes it ought to be staged in hip, unimposing venues and tell relatable stories rather than live in movement-for-movement’s-sake abstraction. Both the story and the music, she believes, should be contemporary. Incorporating mobile and PC games into CandyBomber’s second show, “Fray,” only expands on that ethos.

The games don’t just inform the show; human dancers also inform the digital components.

On a February afternoon at City Dance’s South of Market studio, videographer Jenny Chu recorded the freestyle moves of Misael Dario, Matthew “Ninja” Sutton, Jenelle Gaerlan and Andre Maya for later use as TikTok filters that audiences can use in a social media booth before the show starts. Gaerlan made one kinetic idea travel from her wrist to her back. Sutton simulated playing with an invisible yo-yo then became the yo-yo, his bones as lithe and bendy as a string.

The eventual hope, said Duhamel, is that game players could graft those movements on their own “Fray” avatars, then carry those grooves into different games. “But first, our games,” she said with a smile.

choreogr伦敦编排Sisco戈麦斯aphed “Fray” with John Graham, transmedia projects have the potential to improve the way dancers are valued and treated.

“Everything that we do in the real world is going to eventually just be transported to some type of digital universe,” he said. “It just depends on who harnesses an avenue for it to work for dancers, because it's no secret we're always the most underappreciated and underpaid vessels — but sometimes the most important.”

Ron Weaver, who developed the mobile game “Fray Jam” and who teaches game design at the University of Central Florida, in addition to being a former dancer himself, sees another value in transmedia projects.

“Right now theatrical productions are so ephemeral, right?” he said. “Whereas one of the best things about video games is that they can last for years. The opportunity to extend that into the real world is an incredibly underserved phenomenon.

“I want more and more productions to think about it, but right now we still have very separate silos of development,” and understandably so, he points out. It’s hard enough to develop the expertise of, say, an auteur filmmaker — let alone to add on the skills to translate a film into another medium.

Duhamel understands those who say the whole point of in-person performance is to seek respite from digital devices and to revel in the magic of liveness. At the same time, she said, shows such as “Fray” hopefully will introduce more audiences to that feeling.

“I think there's a lot of synergies between the mental state that you're in, in both of these activities,” she added, of performance and gaming. “I know they seem completely separate to people, and yet games are by nature play, right? You play a game. It's the same state that we can get to with dancing: We're experimenting, we’re improvising, we're having fun, we're moving to music.”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com