Neil Bartlett: The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin
1 - 7 July 1997
Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, London E1
A moving personal meditation on the defining moments in human life written and performed by Neil Bartlett in a lecture room at the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel. The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin was Bartlett's first solo work for four years and Artangel's first commission of a new work using the spoken word. As Bartlett spoke from a text made up of original writing and sections from the Bible and John Donne, leading lighting designer Rick Fisher projected images of the eponymous Sacramants paintings onto the performance while Robin Whitmore, the visual artist with whom Bartlett created A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep in 1988, rendered details from these images onto a blackboard.
Nicolas Poussin's suite of seventeenth century paintings, The Seven Sacraments, depict precise moments in historical time - the moments in which the sacraments of the Christian church were instituted, from Baptism to Extreme Unction. Originally commissioned in 1644, the completed paintings were hung in a single room, each one concealed behind a curtain. To view the paintings, the honoured guest was led into a darkened room, the curtain drawn aside from each picture in turn and the viewer left alone to meditate on the meaning of Poussin's image of the chosen sacrament. In The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin Neil Bartlett reinvents these images, connecting the past to the present in a way that makes us re-imagine both.
Following the performance itself Robin Whitemore made a new series of prints, which accompanied Neil Bartlett's text used in the performance, in a publication available through Cornerhouse. Then, a year later, Neil, along with composer Nicholas Bloomfield and choreographer Leah Hausman, took this text and performed it with an orchestra, choir, dancers and team of schoolchildren - transforming the intimate meditation into a large-scale dramatic oratorio. This final performance - Seven Sacramants - was commissioned by Artangel and took place in three locations across the United Kingdom.
This project was commissioned by Artangel and co-produced with Gloria; it was supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.
