In the “event sauna” of the Awana Spa in Las Vegas, tourists in bathing suits were taking selfies on wood benches lined with neon lights. The sauna was heated to 175F (79C) and the show was about to begin.
A tattooed and bikini-clad “sauna meister” dropped ice infused with essential oils on to the hot stones at the center of the sauna. As pop music pounded through the sauna speakers, she began to wave a towel in elaborate patterns above her head, wafting hot, scented air directly at each cluster of audience members.
The sauna meister moved in a graceful circle around the room, dancing and wafting air infused with citrus at a man in Texas flag-patterned swim trunks, and a young mom escaping her kids for the day. The heat intensified and the music changed. Suddenly, the lights went off and a black light switched on, making the towel glow with an eerie whiteness as it arced through the air.
“That was awesome,” one woman said at the end of the 10-minute performance, sounding completely genuine.
This is “Aufguss”, a German term for “infusion” that has been translated for American audiences as “wellness theater”. The art form, long popular in Europe, is getting its North American debut in an unexpected place: Sin City.
Vegas is not exactly known as a wellness destination: as one longtime hospitality expert there put it, people don’t often say, “Let’s go to Vegas to be well.” Saunas, on the other hand, are typically a place for quiet, sweaty meditation or leisurely conversations with friends, not an opportunity to deploy flashing lights, club music and costumes.
But “wellness” has saturated so deeply into US consumer culture that even Las Vegas, America’s capital of outrage and excess, has started to adjust. As spas from Minneapolis to Brooklyn have started to advertise Aufguss among their offerings, one of the strip’s newest hotels, Resorts World Las Vegas, has begun hosting the performances four times a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday – with experienced Las Vegas dancers taking the roles of the “sauna meisters”.
Aufguss has thrived for decades at European saunas, sometimes as a pleasant minor ritual and sometimes as a form of competitive experimental theater. At the annual Aufguss World Championships in Europe, experts in “show Aufguss” vie for a world master title by guiding audiences through brief, sweaty narratives about women’s suffrage, cowboys, motorcycle gangs or a crisis in a nuclear bunker. There have been sauna adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the musical Billy Elliot.
The narrative tension of the story being told in the sauna is supposed to rise along with the temperature in the room, leading to a simultaneous emotional and physical catharsis. In reviewing a 2019 Aufguss contest, the Guardian’s theatre critic noted that watching a drama competition in a giant sauna with 200 other naked people was reminiscent of “an anxiety dream”, but that some of the performances were unexpectedly moving, and eventually prompted a feeling of “giddy liberation”.
More than a dozen European countries and Japan now send contenders to the World Aufguss Championships; while the United States does not yet participate, the United Kingdom, a late entrant, hosted its first national Aufguss championship this spring.
Presenting “a sauna experience combined with the theatrics of a show” is still considered avant garde in the US, said Kim Key, the Las Vegas spa’s director, who said spa staff were still educating guests on how Aufguss works, and that it does not yet make sense for them to charge an additional fee for the performances.
To train workers in the most authentic European towel-waving and essential oil-diffusing techniques, the spa flew in a three-time world Aufguss champion from the Netherlands, Rob Keijzer, a former IT specialist who now runs a consultancy called ToWell Advice and Training.
Keijzer advises on all aspects of Aufguss production, from constructing sauna-safe light and sound systems, to choreography, to music. While “modern classic” Aufguss shows now feature musicians playing live music in the sauna, Keijzer himself recommends a range of artists, citing Bon Jovi’s It’s My Life, Bruce Springsteen, Enya, and Metallica as excellent Aufguss choices, and noting that Indian classical music and Viking music are also popular.
In Europe, Keijzer said, sauna meisters tend to fit a certain type: in Switzerland, it’s ski instructors and personal trainers; in Germany, lifeguards; while in the Czech Republic and Poland, it’s becoming a full-time job.
Keijzer said “it was amazing” how quickly Las Vegas’s professional dancers mastered the new towel-dancing techniques: “They were really fast.”
Alexi Irvine, 31, worked as a Las Vegas dancer, nutritionalist and personal trainer for a decade before she trained to become one of the spa’s new sauna meisters. Irvine said she quickly learned to scale back the energy of dance performances staged in the intense heat of a sauna. But Aufguss is also emotionally different from anything she has done before, she said, and much more intimate than the typical Vegas dance spectacle. The first time she saw Keijzer and his partner perform an Aufguss routine, she said, “they made me cry. It was that beautiful.”
“I’ve had people cry in my sauna. They’ll say, like, ‘I really needed it,’” Irvine said. “I welcome all kinds of emotions. There are people who groove with you. There are people who just lay down and relax.”
While the spa has a “no photography” rule in the sauna, Key said, the Aufguss performances have made that policy a challenge, since some guests are eager to document the spectacle.
So far, Key said, all of the Vegas spa’s sauna meisters are women.
For now, Vegas is still in the early stages of Aufguss adoption. Awana Spa’s ritual is one of the simpler versions of the form, not one of the narrative-driven, elaborately costumed performances that Keijzer said would probably be too much for American tourists experiencing the form for the first time. (Nudity is also too much for Americans, whose repressed national culture leads to swimsuit-wearing in the sauna.)
The most dramatic version of Aufguss, a gladiatorial-style battle between two sauna meisters, currently takes place in Poland, Keijzer said, in a specially built 300-seat sauna modelled after the Roman Colosseum.
While Americans experiencing Aufguss are “never really ready for it” and “have never seen anything like it”, Irvine said, European tourists sometimes complain that the sauna is not hot enough for them.
“They’re so hardcore over there,” she said. “They want more heat.”
