Introducing sauna as theatre.
As a theatre designer and co-founder of Sauna Sessions Arts Club I’ve been watching the amazing growth of UK sauna through the eyes of someone who designs and builds spaces for collective experiences.
I work alongside theatre director James Grieve and we have been fortunate enough to work all over the world making theatre shows. We’ve made shows in tiny theatres above pubs in London and in massive opera houses in Europe and Canada. Underpinning all of our work together is our deep and passionate conviction that theatre has the power to change lives. That sitting in a room with a group of strangers, sharing a live experience in real time, is a fundamental human need.
Illustration sketch of the sauna theatre for Edinburgh Fringe.
James and I are massive sauna fans, thanks in part to spending so much time working on various theatre projects in Norway and Sweden. And as we sat in various saunas together we started noticing that saunas have a lot in common with theatres.
Both are communal spaces where strangers share an intense, live experience together in real time. In each place, there’s a kind of unspoken agreement to be present, to put daily life on pause, and to enter into a shared understanding with the other people around you, whether they are strangers or friends, work colleagues or family.
It seemed to us that both saunas and theatres can feel like gathering around a campfire: people drawn into the same circle, and sharing something ancient and wordless as much as something spoken.
The sensory environment of the sauna, with the heat, scent, sound, quality of light, breath, proximity to each other, creates a heightened communal state that is immersive and even transformative, the way a powerful show can be.
Illustration sketch of the sauna theatre for Edinburgh Fringe.
Time becomes elastic in both places: minutes can feel endless or can pass by in a flash depending on how the experience goes. And just as a theatre audience can feel collectively “in sync,” a sauna can draw people into a shared physical and emotional connection that’s bigger than any one person’s individual experience.
And then we discovered Aufguss. If you’ve had your first, great Aufguss experience you’ll know the feeling. The moment when the heat hits you, the smell transports you, the sauna master is in complete control and your skin prickles with intoxicating heat, an ice-cold rush and a wave of emotion all at the same time. For us, it was electrifying, we wanted more and we wanted all our friends to try it too.
Sauna Theatre will be the UK’s first purpose built sauna arts centre, and the UK’s largest sauna - although I doubt we will hold that record for long.
It seats 80 people and will have lighting and surround sound for a full theatrical experience.
We are launching in August in Edinburgh at Summerhall Arts as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Sauna Theatre will run every day, all day from 6th to the 31st August.
Our programme is varied and experimental. We’re testing new formats and trying things that haven’t been tried before, all in the hope of creating work that feels sauna-native.
We think the UK has some of the very best theatre makers in the world - from writers and performers to dancers and lighting designers. And we’re genuinely excited to see what happens when you put those artists in the room with sauna practitioners.
We’ve been working with the UK Aufguss team for two years now and we want them to have the best environment possible in order to develop their craft and be able to perform at the highest level, in the UK and beyond.
UK Aufguss can’t continue to grow and professionalise without the right infrastructure around it - bigger saunas and larger audiences - and we hope Sauna Theatre will play a key part in this future.
But we’re also trying lots of other stuff.
We’ve got a mid-morning sauna rave and a literary salon, where performers will read poems and short stories in collaboration with our sauna masters and aufguss performers.
Illustration sketch of the sauna theatre for Edinburgh Fringe.
Writer and performer Nick Cassenbaum is bringing his critically acclaimed, autobiographical one-man show Bubble Schmeisis, set in Canning Town Schvitz.
We’ve got an international aufguss masters slot, which Deborah Carr from UK Aufguss is helping us to programme with fantastic support from Therme Bucharest, where Edinburgh audiences will get to experience the best aufguss performers from Europe, Japan and the UK performing every single day.
Sauna Sessions Arts Club is our experimental slot, where we will have live DJs, aufguss masters and invite fringe performers to come and do one-off segments.
Mysteries of the Picts will be an opportunity to explore ritual, storytelling and native plants and scents through the lens of the ancient Scottish tribe.
We have created Sauna Theatre in the fundamental belief that art and culture are good for human beings, and that “wellness” shouldn’t exclude things like reading, going to the theatre, or listening to music.
We know many of our audience members will be first time sauna goers, and that is a thrilling responsibility.
Our positioning is simple: we want to be part of the creation of a new British sauna culture, one where art and culture - particularly storytelling - sit at the heart of the sauna experience.
(Please come and join us in Edinburgh and be a part of our story.)
