Roller Derby in London! Erm, what? Skye Corewjin is educated by local London Rockin' Roller.
The London Rockin’ Rollers are not a group of musicians, they are not a biker gang, they are in fact an all female roller derby team. Roller derby is no disco event, nor is it a light-hearted skate around the park; it’s actually a rather ferocious contact sport. My knowledge of this particular activity didn’t reach very far so I chatted to Rockin’ Roller, Kit Kat Power to gain some insight. The London Rockin’ Rollers have been around for about three years and are one of the two leagues in London. Sport origin? It's really old (1920s) and the Americans thought it up. Regular bouts aka matches occur quite often, and there's one happening on 15th May in Bethnal Green, right under our noses!
For Kit Kat, roller derby came about like most things in life – through word of mouth and a little curiosity. The sport is for both men and women, but the female league is gaining momentum. Especially since a little press via Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, where Juno star Ellen Page plays an aspiring roller derby misfit. Par for the course is picking your own skate name. As far as labeling their alter egos go, the girls get slightly more creative than Bruce Wayne and Clarke Kent (pairing 'bat' and 'super' with gender is rather unimaginative). Titles usually allude to recognisable names or phrases from the past and present, for example, Femme Fatality, Ghengis Carnage and Scarlet O’Hades. Each name is registered with a roller derby organisation in the US and no name is permitted to be too similar – so when it’s yours, it’s yours alone.
In a nutshell, bouts are players skating around an arena, where the aim is to lap members of the opposing team. With things like blockers, jammers and pivots it may all sound quite confusing but Kit Kat assures me that there are explanatory booklets, as well as commentators, to aid us in appreciating and understanding what's going on. It’s a rather rough and tumble game (as most contact sports are) but plenty of rules assure the relative safety of the players; you can’t use your elbows to block skaters but you can block with pretty much anything else below the shoulder. Cool. Now it sounds perfectly mild. When asked for a comparison, some say it’s like rugby on skates, with no ball. So it's not really like rugby at all. Perhaps it’s better to leave roller derby in its own category.
Noise levels heighten as the bout progresses, the crowd gets louder, as do the players, the skating speeds up and the game intensifies. Witnessing these seemingly hardcore ladies is a darn sight better than spending an afternoon with the telly watching re-runs. An aspiring London Rockin’ Roller should be teeming with a ‘can do’ attitude and the ability to stand their ground on skates wouldn’t hurt. This is not a sport for the faint-hearted or brittle-boned. It's creative, it's different and looks helluva entertaining. Players create complete personae for themselves and seem to have heaps of fun with it. Reading their biographies gives you more of an idea: “Born in deepest, darkest Hackney”, Femme Fatality “rejected the trapeze, the pole and the hula hoop...She knew she'd come home the second she crawled out of her first roller girl pile-up”. Another member was supposedly “abandoned in the swamps of Death Valley” where Werewolves rescued and raised her as their own.
The game is feisty, the atmosphere fun and the players fearless. Is their bark as furious as their bite? Maybe, maybe not, but if I were from the 'Von Vampirella Clan of Transylvania', I think I'd be pretty hardcore too. So wander down to Malice in Derbyland, where jabberwocky and white rabbit don’t make an appearance but some serious X chromosomes most certainly do.
It's all happening 15th May at York Hall where London ladies take on Rainy City's Manchester Motley Crew. Doors open at 4pm and the calamity commences at 5pm.
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