how it started
The Origin
DEVIATED THEATRE is a Washington, D.C.-based dance opera company founded in 2008 by Co-Directors Enoch Chan and Kimmie Dobbs Chan.
Theater Director, Enoch Chan, and Choreographer, Kimmie Dobbs Chan, met in 2002 at the Metropolitan Fine Arts Center in Virginia. They collaborated for the first time, on a spring dance recital.
In 2007, with the idea of building something of their own finally taking real shape, they went to Deborah Riley at Dance Place and asked her, plainly, what it actually took to put on a production. She didn't have to answer, but she was generous with her time anyway, and handed Kimmie her first key to a rehearsal studio at Dance Place II. It took until July 2008 to actually happen.
That month, DEVIATED THEATRE gave its debut with "Aspiro - step into curiosity" at Dance Place in Washington, D.C., to sold-out houses previewed by The Washington Post. One month later, Enoch and Kimmie were married. The company and the marriage began the same summer, and both were built the same way: headfirst, without waiting to feel ready.
Washington City Paper opened its 2008 preview of our debut production, Aspiro, with a simple question: "What, exactly, is the deviation in Deviated Theatre's debut dance/theatre hybrid production?" It's a fair question — one we've been answering ever since. The clearest answer came from actress and author Katharine Schellman, who worked with us early in the process: just as opera tells its stories through song, DEVIATED tells its stories through movement. That comparison stuck, and it's become the truest way we know to describe what happens on our stage.
Co-Directors Enoch and Kimmie don't adapt existing stories into dance — they write new ones directly in the body, drawing on whatever language the story demands: contemporary dance, aerial arts, stage combat, acting, opera, mime, projection. Every piece starts the same way — a character, an image, an emotional undercurrent — and the movement vocabulary follows from there, rather than the other way around. The goal is always the same: a stranger could walk in with no program and no prior knowledge, sit down, and enter a shared world that lingers in the heart and mind. Humor, awkwardness, and children appear often in the work, not as relief from the darker material, but as a way into it. Underneath all of it is a specific way of seeing: a child's eyes meeting a strange, mystical world for the first time, where nothing needs explaining to be believed, and the largest questions — of mortality, fate, our place in the cosmos — arrive not as philosophy, but as wonder.
what is a dance opera
Enoch and Kimmie build worlds from opposite ends and meet in the middle. Enoch is the person behind the curtain who makes the impossible repeatable — holding the moving parts with steadiness so a stage can carry meaning night after night. Kimmie works from what cannot yet be seen — an inner state, a mythology, a becoming — and builds the conditions, through movement, symbol, and image, until it takes form.
Enoch brings more than two decades of experience in theatrical production, cinematography, and lighting design to their realization. He serves as Director of Production for The Washington Ballet and has held the same role, alongside Lighting Design, for Metropolitan Youth Ballet since 2001. His broader career spans more than 25 years across ballet, theatre, and broadcast — including as Senior Lighting Director at PBS/WETA, and as a film director and cinematographer. His photography has earned international recognition, including Top 3 in the U.S. and Top 3 in the World for Fashion Photography from the One Eyeland Awards, with work published in The Washington Post, Washingtonian, Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit, and Dance Teacher. He holds a BFA in Theatre (Directing/Lighting Design) and a BA in Art History from Boston University.
Kimmie serves as Artistic Director and Choreographer, shaping the company's movement language, narratives, and imagined worlds. She brings nearly two decades of choreography and movement education — spanning kinesiology, Pilates, Gyrotonic®, Gyrokinesis®, and yoga — to an unusual fluency in the body as both instrument and storyteller: how posture carries history, how gesture reveals adaptation, how inner experience organizes outward expression. As Creative Director of Enoch Chan Photography, she guides entrepreneurs, artists, and performers through a process that translates inner identity into visual language. Her work and perspective were the subject of a 2026 feature in GOSS Magazine, "Between Portrait & Portrayal," exploring photography as a ritual of becoming and the transformative power of authentic expression.
Together, they founded DEVIATED THEATRE, where Enoch serves as founding Artistic Director and Kimmie as Artistic Director, producer, and choreographer, creating original dance operas through contemporary dance, aerial artistry, theatrical narrative, and symbolism. The company has been commissioned by the National Gallery of Art and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, featured at the National Cherry Blossom Festival, and profiled on WETA Arts. Their collaborative photographic work — including a fashion portrait ranked third in the world by One Eyeland, for which Kimmie served as Movement Director — has become internationally recognized for visual narratives that move from portrait to portrayal.
Across every medium, their shared work asks the same question: what becomes possible when a person — or an audience — encounters themselves at a larger scale. In a cosmos vast beyond comprehension, each of us arrives carrying something the world has never held in quite this form before. Enoch and Kimmie build the structures, worlds, and images that make that knowing visible.