A parade of people in elaborate, exaggerated dress and masks obscuring their faces parade into a sacred temple many millennia old, united by an incantation about aiming to transcend this mortal coil. Could be an ancient rite — or if legendary multi-hyphenate artist Nona Hendryx and her band of collaborators have anything to do with it, just another Saturday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The incantation in question was Sun Ra’s 1960 composition “Rocket Number Nine,” the temple was the Met’s Temple of Dendur, and the parade featured Hendryx and an ensemble of musicians and dancers — all combined to connect the New York landmark with something at least conceptually aligned with the kinds of rituals it might have housed in its original Egyptian home. “Nona Hendryx and Disciples of Sun Ra in the Temple” was planned by Hendryx as part of Harlem Stage’s yearlong series, “The Cosmic Synthesis of Sun Ra and Afrofuturism,” of which she is the artistic director.

The ambitious, immersive performance featured polished (but not too polished) versions of classic Sun Ra compositions like “Space Is The Place,” “When There Is No Sun” and “Enlightenment” as the centerpiece of a multimedia conceptual journey, from the kaleidoscopic lights projected onto the ancient temple to the fittingly space-age, gender-bending, avant-garde costumes designed by Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz to even a metallic, sculptural treatment on the mic stands. “Living sculptures,” as Hendryx referred to the dancers,” performed not onstage but around the audience in the aisles. No detail was left unexamined, fitting given Sun Ra’s long history of high-concept performances — today, the Sun Ra Arkestra still performs in full Afrofuturist regalia.

Hendryx first saw Sun Ra in the late 1960s, when he had relocated from New York to Philadelphia just as Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles were transforming from, as she puts it, a “girl group,” into the more experimental LaBelle — who themselves eventually adopted elements of Afrofuturism both in their costumes and their songs, which were mostly written by Hendryx.

“It was really considered this odd, cult-like, singular musical space,” Hendryx told Billboard of the Arkestra’s reputation at that time. “I was intrigued by it and wanted to know more, so I saw the Arkestra play in a small club in Philadelphia. I was floored.”

Hendryx has remained connected to Sun Ra and the experimental, Afrofuturist music scene throughout her career, even making an album with Kahil El’Zabar (an alumnus of Chicago avant-garde institution the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) in 2011. It made her a natural choice to helm Harlem Stage’s Afrofuturist series, which includes movie screenings, speculative fiction workshops and performances by up-and-coming experimentalists like Moor Mother and Black Quantum Futurism, whom Hendryx sees as the heirs to the Afrofuturist tradition.

“They’re also out of Philadelphia — which is interesting, you know?” she says. “Two young Black women who have totally embraced quantum theory Afrofuturism, not just from a musical perspective but with the knowledge of who we are, and what we do here in the time that we’re here, and … what is time and what does it mean to you?”