It started with a marching band, led by a severe gray-suited woman with medals pinned to her breast. Following them upstairs, you were plunged into semi-darkness—first aware only of a huge space echoing with wails, chants, music, and the sounds of stamping feet. Then, suddenly slap-bang in front of you there was a state funeral going on: a propped-up figure of the Communist leader of the former Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito on one side, while center-stage an imposing singer monumentally swathed in a black taffeta robe, with a towering felt head-dress ululated a piercing Serbian lament. The woman in the gray suit laid flowers and marched on into the darkness.

Thus, you’d transitioned into the creepily affecting world of Marina Abramović and her Balkan Erotic Epic performance. Summoning her home region’s folk rituals of sex, marriage, death, and religion, the artist is reckoning with humanity’s struggle with the forces of nature, her own inherited trauma, and very much else that feels viscerally relevant to women. It builds with a frenetic collective pulse on 13 separate stages with 70 performers for over four hours, while the audience wanders, coming face-to-face with macabre and surreal enactments—a young woman being married to a dead young man is just one of them—women throwing up their skirts and screaming as they show their vaginas to the sky, men lying face-down, humping grass.

When I caught Abramović at Roksanda Ilincic’s show at London Fashion Week, she gave me an idea of what was to come at her show. “It’s really pagan rituals from the fourth century to the 11th century, when Albanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Serbian people used vaginas and phalluses for agriculture. If there was heavy rain and crops were threatened in the village, women would go out in the fields and scare the gods to stop by showing them their vaginas,” she explained, adding with some relish, “I think it’s going to be hell with the British, because they’re not used to nudity. In our days now, with our kind of way of looking at the naked body, we see everything as pornography. But I found in this poetry.”