Dancehall Divas has not been shelved contrary to rumors on social media…
It was just over a year ago that the producers of Dancehall Divas of Toronto flew to Mississauga to meet with some of Toronto’s most prolific and popular dancehall players. As described to us, it was a late spring afternoon in early May and the weather was quite pleasant in the low key northeast suburb where the meeting took place. One by one it was said that the potential cast members trickled in to a cramped film studio while Executive Producer, Heather Elliott-Whitehead and an Executive Assistant served champagne and wine to the anxious gang who were waiting to hear what this meeting was really all about. Heather described an air thick with tension and discomfort as some of the women in particular were at odds with each other and that made for quite an incredibly edgy scenario.
Fast forward to 2019 and after quite a big build up to what seemed like a game changer for international dancehall, there is still no show and very little transparency as to what is happening with the show, until now. We sat down with Heather for a super candid exclusive on all things Dancehall Divas of Toronto.
(UPDATED: 5/14/19
This interview was not edited to alter any statements by interviewees. EPG reps were Shane Morton and Sonya B. )
EPG: Hi Heather, thanks for having us. The last time we were here, we caused quite a stir. We hope for a repeat? (Laughs)
Heather: (Chuckles loudly), Ha! No controversies this time. Sorry to let you down. I do plan to answer all your questions openly which I hope will in some way respond to all the people who are secretly or anxiously waiting for the show to come out. They deserve some answers so bring it on.
EPG: Can I take you back to May last year? Describe what happened and what was accomplished in that first meeting. I am curious after hearing your assistant described the tension.
Heather: Well, I for one was super excited. I could sense that there was a lot of tension, but after a couple glasses of champagne, everyone loosened up and the meeting got underway. In fact, a true funny story. So, we had ordered some elaborate fancy food from a supposedly high end caterer and I was personally looking forward to wooing the folks with great food and beverage, but the food never showed up, so we had to grab pizza up the block. It was funny and upsetting at the same time. We had quite a laugh and gobbled down Pizza, but the gourmet fare would have been so much better (Chuckles loudly). Lesson learnt for me was never to pre-pay for food unless you can get a guarantee! (laughs out loudly). In terms of the meeting, it was very successful. We wouldn’t have the slightest hint of a show without that meeting. For confidentiality reasons, I won’t get into what we discussed at the meeting, but all involved left with a better understanding of just what it takes to be part of something like this.
EPG: This may be redundant, but you never know. Not all of the people who were at the meeting are in the show right? Well we know about one former cast member who left. Is everyone still in tact?
Heather: To be quite honest, we had overhauled the show long before that particular cast member left. Many people do not know that we had invited male cast members and decided after some consideration that it was best to focus on the women and have the men as supporting cast. Our original cast of Lady Hilly, Nikki Hype, Sexii Peppa, Asoya Luxury and Barbie Dolley are still here and Danielle D.I. is still in as well. I absolutely adore those women. They deserved to be successful. They are dedicated and patient and I have learned to love and respect them greatly. They are hustlers and they have not stopped grinding and doing their thing. My team and the external executives we are working with admires them and love their stories and their swag. We do have a couple other high profile names on stand by to join the ladies in a supporting way…like a friend of the show and so on. They will not be main stars like the original ladies, but for a show like this to work successfully, you have to introduce guest casts and friends. We are nowhere near divulging that information yet. You will just have to wait (smiling)
EPG: So I guess my next question is what’s next for the show? What happened to DDOT?
Heather: Hahhhhh, every time I hear that question, I cringe. Seriously! (chuckle loudly). I am smiling but there is so much going on that it’s hard to start at one place, but I will try. You see for one, if we had followed our confidentiality agreements (me and my team included), we wouldn’t be having this interview. We screwed up big time where that is concerned. It’s a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. If we had kept quiet about the show like we were supposed to, we would have just come out and aired and no one would know how long it took us. But when you build up the kind of anticipation we did and then drop off the radar, it makes people question your legitimacy and gives them reason to ask what the hell is going on. The fact is that we haven’t stopped working on the show. We have a well respected company and agent in Hollywood that have signed on with us to rep the show to the big players like the network stations you know and love and that process is very time consuming and highly sensitive. In an effort not to jeopardize our relationships with those involved, we cannot discuss exactly where that process is at this time. In light of all of this, we’ve had to scale down our social media activity and do only intermittent posts etc just to let people know we have not gone into oblivion. But we are still working on making dreams come true. Just to understand how this business works, it took Love & Hip Hop Atlanta three years to make the first pilot and when Spice was invited to the show for example, she was being courted for well over a year. These things take time, however as I said, the mistake we made was to make the show concept public before its time and we are paying for that in the court of public opinion. I make no apologies though for the timeline. Good things take time. Since that time, the divas have fully grasped the need of being confidential so someone may think nothing is happening or if someone asks them what’s happening as people so often do, they may not get a straight answer or the answer they wish to hear. We are very tight lipped on what is really happening now and that’s refreshing and important. Toronto has a killer show on its hands and the world will not wait in vain. It will be worth every month or year it takes to materialize…well hopefully not years, but you get the gist.
EPG: You recently had a tragedy in your family. Did that impact your work with the show? Do you care to talk about that?
Heather: Yes. It did. It impacted everything and changed my life forever. I lost my only brother who was my twin’ in a tragic motorcycle crash and I stopped working for three months, one month of which I spent in Jamaica dealing with all of that. It took the wind out of me. Anything that I was working on came to a hard stop and DDOT was one of those projects, so for a couple months, I couldn’t travel to meetings and do my everyday grind to make things happen faster than they might have, but I wouldn’t change anything. My brother was an important part of my world and I had to stop and pause and did what I had to do to heal and take care of family matters. It is still very difficult to accept. I suspect I will never get over it, but I am hoping that as time goes on, I will feel better about getting back to everyday life. I am not the kind of girl who will just shiver up and fade even under the most tragic circumstances, so I am well on my way to kicking up dust again. It’s just me (chuckles). My brother will live with me in my heart while I hustle out here everyday and that makes it worth it even more.
EPG: I am so very sorry Heather. I can’t imagine what you and your family are going through. Wow. I know you don’t want to dwell on this so I am going to go back to Dancehall Divas. Looking back at all that has happened with the show (or anticipation of the show) and the not so recent controversy that took social media by storm when one of your cast members left, were you taken aback by the negativity that surrounded that particularly situation? We haven’t really spoken on it. Have you spoken to your ex castmember at all?
Heather: Actually, sorry to disappoint you but I left all of that in 2018. I haven’t spoken on it since then with my team or even the Divas. If I were to honestly address the negativity, then it means I would be complicit to it. When all of that was going on, I told people not to send me screenshots and videos of people speaking ill about me. I had completely blocked it, so I didn’t know what was going on. The ladies didn’t discuss it and my team didn’t know these people so they said nothing of it to me and it meant nothing to them. These are people I have never personally or formally met, so I was a little confused by how they could be so personal and vitriolic and then I remembered the work I do and the field I am in. I know I was telling the truth and the individuals concerned knew that I was telling truth. I had no reason to be negative towards someone who I really liked for the show. We had a great rapport and they were treated equally as the others. Something happened and they know what it was. They made those decisions. The decision had nothing to do with me or my team. We were blindsided just like everybody else and that’s the truth. The entire truth. I suspect that people had issue with how your writers chose to do the article and I guess some words were taken out of context and in some case, they misinterpreted some some parts of the article as well. I think that riled up some supporters. This is par for the course. I heard of many assumptions that were made and the people who made them spoke with such conviction that it was quite glaring to me that social media can be really dangerous when it’s being used in the wrong way. I do not manage our DDOT social media pages for example and I got the impression that people believed that I was personally posting things and that was quite hilarious. I am much too busy for that. I had tried to be reasonable in my responses to a couple people and that was taken out of context, so right then I decided that there was no point and the ‘nine days’ dramatic cycle came and went and here we are. If you hadn’t brought it up, I wouldn’t have remembered really. I am being completely honest. I must say though that what was really important for me was for the DDOT women to know that all of that was a huge distraction and not even an amazing global icon and mentor like Michelle Obama is immuned from naysaying, so my hope while all of that was going on was that the current cast stood strong in their belief of the show and kept their focus on the goal. As far as I know, they did. We are not in close proximity daily, but it appears that the women have found a place of respect for each other and are supportive of each other in their own way and that is very admirable. The last time I physically met up with them, the air was warm, the vibes was right and everyone was in a great mood. We have a private group that we communicate in often and those exchanges are great and we look forward to them. The women show support for each other and the conversations can be very candid and fun. That’s a chance to keep in touch and close to each other while we work on the show and talk often that way. They’ve come a long way and I am so very proud of them.
EPG: So have you spoken to the ex-castmember? You didn’t answer. Pretty sure I am not the only one who wants to know if you guys met up and discussed what happened. (smiles)
Heather: You are just pushing for some drama huh? The answer is No and I have no interest. I have honestly and respectfully put that all behind me from the time all of that went down. It’s been months. We have all moved on. Absolutely nothing there to discuss. You guys should drop this now.
EPG: Ok, we shall move on. Let’s talk about Michelle Obama, you recently met her right? What was that like? Do tell.
Heather: I am still waiting on my photos. I check my emails everyday to see if they will appear because I am pretty sure that my face was flushed and my cheeks looked stuff from all the excitement. As you know, outside of Dancehall Divas, I have an entirely different life. I not only have a nine to five, I am Chairperson for a special multi-global networking organization called Empower Canada, a community networking organisation for women of color. I was lucky enough to take over a hundred young women, mostly from the Toronto, Oshawa and Winnipeg area to meet Mrs. Obama in Chicago on one leg of her Becoming Book Tour. We met her as part of our efforts to mentor women and girls and the women were in total awe as was I. We were not able to take cameras back stage in the area they had us, but there was a formal photographer and we are anxiously awaiting those photos (chuckles loudly). She spoke to us for a few minutes and greeted us warmly and gave us a little pep talk that was pretty impactful. She is just everything you imagined. Much skinnier in person. Seriously.
EPG: So what’s the last word for all the supporters of the show?
Heather: Thank you for believing in the women. The show will be a win for the culture and most importantly for your city. The city has one of the most vibrant sub-cultures of dancehall in the world so the stories will be told only the way Torontonians can do through the women you know to be the ultimate stars of dancehall and that my friends will be more than worth the wait. Thank you for the love and we are loving all your supportive messages and DMs. This will however be my last interview until we are ready to share actual broadcast news.
EPG: Thank you for agreeing to the interview Heather. All the best with the show.
