LIVING IN AMERICA   Expression, Representation and Kate Hickey’s Roller Dreams

When Roller Dreams (2017) skates across the screen, offering a chronicle of the roller-dancing scene in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach, it glides by on a memory and a question. The first film by Australian editor-turned-filmmaker Kate Hickey, the documentary can be traced back to her love of the Olivia Newton-John rollerskating movie Xanadu (Robert Greenwald, 1980) and her nostalgic desire to seek out the area that sparked the film – and the roller-dancing trend – when she first arrived in the US. Hickey didn’t find what she was expecting, however. Though a wave of late 1970s and early 1980s titles had featured roller dancing, what she saw was ‘[f]amiliar but markedly different too’, as she describes it in her director’s statement:

I was shocked to discover these were the original roller dancers who had inspired Xanadu, Skatetown, U.S.A. [William A Levey, 1979] and Roller Boogie [Mark L Lester, 1979], because [to] an outsider, they didn’t look anything like the hokey characters in the movies – they were mostly African American, male, and there wasn’t a leg warmer in sight.