By Andy Ingamells and Jessica Cooper

In 2011 Jessica Cooper and I created Piano Recital in Birmingham: an hour-long show in which I tried to play the piano as best I could while Jessica gradually filled it with red paint and wallpaper paste. The previous year we had refurbished an old piano that someone was throwing out, and painted it gold because, well because gold is nice. (We then did a show where we sang classics while getting drunk on ginger wine). I had always wanted to do a piano destruction piece, and thought this would be the perfect opportunity seeing as the piano was old, cheap and barely stayed in tune. Jessica suggested making it into a performance that was less aggressive/cliché than a conventional piano destruction. The programme of pieces comprises works that I thought I would be able to play with my limited pianistic ability, and I also took some lessons with Fumiko Miyachi in an attempt to improve. The performance was stitched together by a video diary that is in some way inspired by Tehching Hsieh's One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece).

After that first performance in 2011 we took the piece to Wunderbar Festival in Newcastle where we performed in the NewBridge Project gallery. The piece then returned to Birmingham for Frontiers Festival in 2014, this time with Maya Verlaak pouring the buckets of wallpaper paste. The old Birmingham Conservatoire was scheduled for demolition in June 2017, and it was decided that Piano Recital would be revived as the final performance to take place in the building. This time Lucy Morton mixed the buckets and Oli Clark filmed. Since then the piece has been performed at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (with Jane Hackett of Kirkos) and Cork Fringe (with Benjamin Burns).