MANCHESTER, England—While others took to the beach and countryside this past fourth of July weekend, I headed across the Atlantic to an unlikely destination — Manchester, England — to attend the debut of “Marina Abramović presents…” It was one of several opening acts in the boldly edgy Manchester International Festival, now in its second year. Abramović, the self-described “grandmother of performance art,” was taking over the city’s small but illustrious Whitworth Art Gallery and, with the blessing of its director Maria Balshaw, stripping the museum bare of its Turners and Constables to transform it into a laboratory for live art. In the gallery’s various rooms, including a stairwell and basement, 14 artists, many of them Abramović’s former students, were to engage in individual performances, each four hours in duration, for the 17 days until the festival’s close.

Critical to this epic event was the audience’s participation. Abramović believes it is the public who completes an artwork, and she has been “frustrated” — one imagines more likely infuriated, and who could blame her? — by audience members who chat about dinner plans and check their BlackBerries during her performances, in which she challenges the limits of body and mind. Before each performance in Manchester, audience members were to be asked to check their personal possessions and cell phones in the lobby, don lab coats, follow Abramović through “The Drill,” an hour-long course in how to view and understand durational art, and remain in the museum for the entire four-hour show.

While there are many artists whose work I greatly admire, I don’t generally dish out serious cash and travel thousands of miles to attend the openings of their shows. But Marina Abramović is different. For me, her body art defines the term “groundbreaking.” She’s fond of the Martha Graham quote, “Wherever a dancer stands is holy ground,” and I believe where she performs art and spirit do indeed converge. Through profound but simple means, her works explore the most elemental of mysteries: energy, consciousness, and transformation. So my trip to Manchester was not so much an art jaunt as a pilgrimage.

Like all good pilgrimages, it was full of revelations. First, was Manchester itself. I knew, of course, it was in the north; that it was home to one of the world’s top “football” teams — and its own brand of hooligans; and that as a longtime textile manufacturing center, it had been a key engine of Britain’s industrial revolution, as well as a hotbed of political radicalism. What I didn’t know is that it has a cutting-edge cultural scene, which flourishes against the backdrop of some of the most distinguished Victorian architecture in England. Manchester’s town hall by Alfred Waterhouse is a neo-gothic masterpiece with ornate mosaic floors and murals by the noted pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown.

After a big chunk of the city center was devastated by a horrible IRA bombing in 1996, the largest ever in England, Manchester’s leadership responded quickly by holding an international design competition for a new master plan. It then skillfully used this impetus for rebuilding not only to construct a new city center, improving dramatically on the largely postwar, ill-conceived structures that had been destroyed, but also to regenerate some of the city’s blighted surrounding districts. The bulk of the work was completed in four short years, and the result is a modern city that blends old and new architecture with refreshing sensitivity and style. Manchester, it turns out, is a model of progressive urbanism.

In a city long shaped by provocation, it makes sense that the emblem for this year’s festival should be a specially commissioned public artwork by Gustav Metzger, the 83-year-old, German-born, London-based artist and political activist, who may be best known as the progenitor of Auto-Destructive Art. (Another revelation: it was this aesthetic theory that inspired former art student Pete Townshend of the Who to smash his guitar during performances!) Entitled Flailing Trees, Metzger’s installation is situated in the city’s Peace Garden, across the street from the imposing town hall, and features 21 inverted willow trees “drowned” in a block of concrete, their dying roots exposed to the sky.