Why roller girls rock my world

When I first moved back to Hamilton last August, I underwent a fairly predictable lull in studio productivity - too much time unpacking and reassessing, not enough time to let new ideas come to the fore given the change in setting. Fortunately, a few weeks into my return to Canadian soil, I also went to see my first Hammer City Roller Girls bout. Within days I found myself producing rapid-fire charcoal drawings from my observations at the bout and the photos displayed at the HCRG website.

In many ways, roller derby gave me the impetus I needed to start drawing again after a highly stressful move overseas, and with the new season already underway I’m both compelled to translate the upcoming bouts into more drawings and wary of doing so without examining the impulse more closely.

Fact is, the roller girl not only responds to my first love for figuration, but also presents a wonderfully retro crossover of sexuality, violence and a certain athleticism that is fairly prevalent in contemporary art. But to stretch further back, I’m also strongly reminded of Degas’ dancers.

Degas, The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage, circa 1874

Scenes like this had a lot to say about dancers as well as the social milieu in which they moved - the internal rivalries, the omnipresent male choreographers and salacious spectators (note the tubby bastard and chair-straddling weirdo off to the right of the painting), the moments of both hard training and idle waiting. In the wake of ballet’s ascent into well-nigh untouchable respectability, however, thsoe traits are now better found in the roller derby rink.

Mind you, I do find this image of Danger Mouse and Bitchslap Barbie laying the smack down on the ref team a far more realistic vision of a spectator sport’s unstaged moments. It also reinforces the strongest contrast to Degas’ dancers - these women own this sport.

The real life of the sport, however, is in the play itself, which in turn reveals its own conceptual concerns. The stills I managed to snag on my Nikon tend to highlight the obvious abstractions possible, though for my part I’m more interested in the durational issues of time being raised by the physical progress of skaters around a rink. Roller derby is quite fortunately rife with infinity - players skate in a constant circle rather than a straight line, with other bodies providing the sole marker of progress in their path and, endurance aside, they could well go on forever. And they’re on wheels.

The next HCRG bout is happening this coming Saturday 24th at the Dave Andreychuk Arena, where Hamilton’s newest team, the Death Row Dames, will face off against Ottawa RD. I’ll most definitely be there, camera and sketchbook firmly in tow.

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