Radiohead win the dice and play first at Split Sides in Brooklyn

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave the premiere of Split Sides at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday night, with Radiohead and Sigur Rós each playing about 20 minutes of new music live, and a throw of dice on stage put Radiohead first. Three members of the band gave a thumbs-up at winning the opening slot, and their fans in the packed balconies cheered. It was the only night the bands played live. The rest of the run, to 18 October, uses recordings.

The curtain at the Howard Gilman Opera House rose on New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who stood with Cunningham and Jasper Johns to praise the company's 50th anniversary, both bands beside them and the dancers warming up behind.

Everything in the piece comes in pairs (two scores, two decors, two sets of costumes by James Hall, two lighting plots by James F. Ingalls), and the dice decide which of each comes first. Cunningham had told The New York Times before the run that chance frees the mind when there are many possibilities. You can roll the dice. It relieves your mind.³

Neither band had seen the choreography when they wrote their music. Radiohead's half came with the black-and-white costumes, a backdrop like a glacier and wintry lighting. It had no songs as such, and no guitars, drums or singing beyond some moans and yelps from Thom Yorke. Instead there were clean keyboards, pulsing techno beats and cut-up speech about religious faith and scandal, sent round the auditorium through speakers all over the hall, with one radio voice on what still counts as devout chopped up and brought back again and again. To one fan in the audience it was Radiohead's familiar devices put to something new, neither a film score nor a stretched-out song, with passages that recalled “Treefingers”, “The Gloaming”, “How to Disappear Completely” and “Kid A”.

Sigur Rós, with the dancers in colour, played an instrument made from ballet slippers, a combination lock and a bow drawn across a xylophone. Jim Farber, reviewing for the New York Daily News, thinks the chance pairing worked, with Radiohead's clean synth lines matching the glacier and the floating dance, though he doubts even devoted fans will play the music at home.