Light up the disco ball, lace up and get ready to move because roller skating is back.
In Montreal, hit up a park, rink or repurposed downtown church, and you may see a crew decked out in rollers on four wheels.
“You do it whenever you want, wherever you want, with whomever you want, in the way you want,” said Chloé Seyrès, who goes by Kozmic Skater when on stage.
Kozmic is a four-time world champion freestyle slalom skater, French national roller derby team player and Cirque du Soleil performer. But, above all, she dances.
“It’s dancing on roller skates,” she said. “There are lots of different ways of dancing. The way I do it is using movement I already know from freestyle slalom, which I combined into growing this vocabulary into doing moves on skates to music.”
Kozmic founded Skatespace five years ago during the pandemic and now teaches up to a dozen classes a week, from dance to slalom to learn to skate.
“Chloe is a really thoughtful teacher, a really caring teacher, and she has a really amazing way of breaking down this like decades-long expertise into really simple methods that I feel like almost anybody at any level can learn from,” said Marbella Carlos. “She’s created this inclusive place where people are not afraid to fall and like get back up again, and I feel like the resilience that they learn in roller skating, you can see it transfer into their personal lives.”
Carlos is the award-winning burlesque performer Joy Rider. She met Kozmic rollerskating in Parc La Fontaine, and the two hit it off. The two are now engaged.
The two combined their two art forms and perform as Kozmic Joy.
“We created this, this duo, and it’s been, it’s been amazing. It’s been life-changing in the way that it brought us, brought us places,” said Kozmic.
The duo won Most Innovative in 2023 at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and has performed across Canada and internationally.
“It’s really cool to see the two movement genres complement each other and kind of push against each other, and we have a lot of fun playing with kind of what roles and what doesn’t, and dancing on heels and dancing on wheels, and it’s been really beautiful to be able to create art telling stories about queer love, and to do it on skates, and while to get our clothes off,” said Joy with a laugh.
Montreal rolling the boom
Kosmic is at the heart of a roller-skating boom in the city.
Joanie Darveau, who goes by Fairy Floss it right along side, and started skating with Kosmic during the pandemic.
She said that during that time, people were looking for solo sports. A 2020 Instagram post by Oumi Janta in Berlin went viral, and people started lining up to buy skates and dance.
“This video created a boom,” she said. “Everybody wanted to do what she was doing, and, as well, there was the comeback of disco.”
The trend spread, and now Skatespace and other rollerskate promotors pack events.
“Right now, there’s a big trend around roller dance and roller skates, and yeah, it’s not the only Montreal, it’s everywhere the same.”
