For ninety years, hundreds of thousands of adults and children have packed the KiMo theatre to watch ballet, drama, spoken-word, and to listen to poetry readings. Performers have acted, sung, danced, and spellbound audiences with magic. Local filmmakers flock there to watch their indie films come alive on the new silver screen. The KiMo continues to host movie premieres and vintage film festivals.
The KiMo Theatre boasts a broad spectrum of Facts, Fiction, and Folklore including newly-told stories, articles, memoirs, insights, opinions, never-before-heard remembrances, and researched facts about the KiMo Theatre as a performing arts theatre and a movie palace. This collection was written by people who, over the years, have developed and nurtured a loving, respectful relationship with the theatre. Past employees, elected officials, performers, and audience members share remembrances of the Bachechi family who built the theater, the theatre's construction in 1927, the 1977 vote by Albuquerque citizens to buy and preserve the building, the theatre's closings for renovations, its murals, art, and (and disputed) paranormal activity.
Here you will find passed-down family folklore and anecdotes that reflect the rich, flamboyant, and diverse cultural life inside the theatre, and the impact the KiMo has had on the lives of the people who have supported it for ninety years. These personal insights are a lens which reveals the broader and deeper story of the theatre.
Included is an account written by an Isleta Tribal elder about the relationship between Oreste Bachechi and Pablo Abeita, and a tale told by a man who first danced with his father on stage at the KiMo as a child. An author writes about her first visit and how she was charmed and intrigued by the KiMo Theatre's ambiance. Teachers write about the impact of attending performances with students and parents. An article about a KiMo staff member whose work at the KiMo touched members of the Albuquerque community is an example of how life at the KiMo is not insular. One essay is the personal, tragic, but hilarious story that demonstrates occasional confusion when the name KiMo is spoken but not written.
Memories included in KiMo Theatre: Fact & Folklore have passed from one generation to a younger generation to today's theatre-goers. Some early and present-day tales may be true, but others may only be true in the storyteller's story. Some facts are still being researched.
Many of the photographs in this book have been preserved by museums, universities, the City of Albuquerque, and the KiMo Theatre itself. Their use was donated to SouthWest Writers for publication in this book.
The KiMo Theatre is more than a concrete building, more than a performing arts center, and more than a meeting place for friends. The KiMo Theatre is a symbol of the endurance of a dream. It is a living, breathing, growing part of Albuquerque, fully the sum of its historical, cultural, spiritual, artistic, and community parts.
--Jacqueline Murray Loring, April 2018
SouthWest Writers is a non-profit organization devoted to helping both published and non-published writers improve their craft and further their careers. Located in Albuquerque, NM, SWW is the largest and oldest writing group in the southwest. It serves writers of all ages worldwide in every fiction and nonfiction genre. Every year the organization hosts a wide variety of workshops, conferences, contests, and classes covering every form of writing, editing, publishing and marketing. More than half of our members are published authors.
Jacqueline Murray Loring is a writer, award winning poet, a produced playwright, film maker, and screenwriter. In 2012, she won the Doire Press Irish International Poetry Prize for her collection The History of Bearing Children, published in Galway. It won second place in the 2012 New Mexico Press Women award for creative verse. Loring works as a book editor, and book and script consultant. Since her move from Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 2012 to Albuquerque, New Mexico she has written/co-written almost a dozen filmed short scripts. Beside writing scripts for produced movies, she has worked as a producer, script consultant and directed one film. Several of her short films have been accepted into film festivals including Trains, Tracks & Aliens and The House on Normal Street produced by Antonio Weiss. In 2018, she was a finalist in the New Mexico Film Foundation's "Let's Make a Western" contest. Loring was the executive director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, coordinator of the Eventide Arts Playwriting Competition, and facilitator of the Cape Cod Screenwriters Group. She is the 2018/2019 president of the Yucca Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, and a member of the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, New Mexico Women in Film and Video, Military Writers Society of America, and SouthWest Writers.
A major contributor of information and historical photographs of the KiMo Theatre, Rudy Miera was a teacher for over twenty years and a member of La Compañía de Teatro de Alburquerque. He acted in Nuevo Mexico Sí! and played guitar for La Compañía's plays. For a while, he, along with Rebeca Benjamin and other educators, worked as coordinators between the school systems and La Compañía, ensuring attendance of students for the shows at the KiMo.
