THE National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), this morning, mounted its annual Easter Sunday morning of music and movement at the Little Theatre in St Andrew.

The performance was dedicated to stage manager Anthony Locke and NDTC founding member, Sheila Barnett, who both died recently.

Among the works scheduled to be performed was Barnett’s The Rope and The Cross. A popular piece in the NDTC repertoire, it has become that more poignant during Easter.

At the recent thanksgiving service for the life of Sheila Barnett, long-time friend, actor and writer Rev Easton Lee recalled that it was a comment he heard as a youngster that would spawn The Rope and The Cross — a poem, a ballet and a play.

The Sunday Observer caught up with Rev Lee in Florida where he now resides, for his recollections and reflections on this Jamaican Easter tradition.

“When I was about 12, I overheard a conversation between my mother and Aunt Rose who sold bammies on our shop piazza in Siloah, St Elizabeth. They were talking of the joys and burdens of motherhood, and my mom said she knew how the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, must have felt to see him so brutally killed. Aunt Rose’s response was, ‘But all of us forget that Judas did have a mother too’.”

Lee said that remark would haunt him for decades and he always wanted to do something about it. He toyed with the idea of writing a play on a possible meeting between Mary and the mother of Judas. However, years would pass and even after studies in California, earning a Diploma in Theatre, and years of acting on stage, the play still did not happen. Then there was work, marriage and children which would take precedence in his life, but still the haunting statement by Aunt Rose would not go away, and continued to play over and over in his head.

So, in order to preserve the idea, Lee got out his trusted typewriter, “no computers then”, he states, and wrote a narrative poem.

Lee discloses that it was through his wife that he met Barnett and they became close friends. During a discussion one Saturday afternoon, over a bowl of pumpkin soup, Aunt Rose’s comment, and the narrative came up.

“I showed Sheila the poem, she asked for a copy. I gave her the only copy. She said she liked the poem. Nothing was said for years until one day she invited me to the dance studio, she said she wanted me to see something. The something was the ballet between the two mothers which she titled The Rope and The Cross. It was very moving,” Lee recalls.

The year was 1974, and he remembers being stunned speechless by the ballet presented by Sheila Barnett and fellow dancer Monica McGowan, noting that he wept for five minutes. “The idea I got from the remark by Aunt Rose, came vividly, artistically and movingly to life and so appropriately titled by Sheila,” Lee adds.

That moment became the catalyst for Lee to again pick up his typewriter and pen the play, which with Barnett’s permission, he titled The Rope and The Cross. Five years later, it was mounted at St Barnabas Anglican Church in Siloah, St Elizabeth on Easter day — April 15, 1979. The production has gone on to play in churches all over Jamaica and was once mounted in Toronto, Canada.

The Rope and The Cross tells the story of the Passion, through the eyes of two Jamaican mothers, who double as the two Mothers of the Passion, and a possible meeting of these two women. Lee explains that the idea was to make it relevant to “Jamaica, Jamaican situations, and the problems of Jamaican motherhood”.

Over the years, a trove of Jamaican stage gems have been cast in the stage version of The Rope and The Cross. This list is headed by the likes of Leonie Forbes, Bari Johnson, Fae Ellington and Easton Lee himself and goes on to include Rooney Chambers, Gary Harvey, Marguerite Newland, John Frances, Brian McLeod, Peter Hunt, Geoff Fairweather, Errol Smith, Patsy Newland, Alwyn Scott, Munair Zacca and Pablo Hoilett.

One special moment occurred during a mounting in Alley, Clarendon, which Lee described as spiritual. “During the scene when the body of Judas was being cradled by his mom — Pieta-style — and the setting sun shone directly on them from the west window. It was quite stunning,” he says.

The last time The Rope and The Cross was mounted in Jamaica was in the Trinity Anglican Church, Westgate Montego Bay back in 1990.

The Barnett-choreographed ballet has had its share of fame.

Lee remembers, “I grew up in the Anglican church, the staid Anglican tradition, where you did not talk in church, you did not clap and sing in church, that was forbidden. And as to dance in church, you must be mad. I usually put on a concert in that church on Easter Sunday evening, and at one such, I had two little girls dance in a simple worship dance, and some persons about five or six walked out. They were very upset with me.

Then the following year I took Sheila (Barnett) and Monica (McGowan), and after explaining what the dance was about they danced. Well there were few dry eyes in the church that evening, including the men. The dance was no longer resented.”

This moving duet, first performed by Barnett and McGowan for the NDTC in 1975, has seen some of the company’s brightest stars take on the roles. That list includes Patsy Ricketts, Melanie Graham, Natalie Chung, Judith Pennant and Denise Robinson. Tamara Noel and Keita Marie Chamberlain are the new guardians of Barnett’s legacy.

In addition to the play and the ballet, Aunt Rose’s comments, as preserved by Lee, have gone on to inspire a poem by Professor Mervyn Morris, a triptych of Barnett’s dance and one of the plays was painted by artist Susan Alexander, and in the late ’90s, an adaptation of the play, which included music, was staged in the Corporate Area.