Aquardens spa, on the outskirts of Verona, is typically the epitome of tranquility. Natural thermal springs feed expansive indoor and outdoor pools. Vineyards on the foothills of the Italian Alps grace the horizon. There are steam rooms, saunas, and a snow alcove, where snowflakes waft down on visitors wishing to cool off after a sweating session. But for a week this fall, the thudding bass of electronic dance music emanates from inside the spa’s largest sauna.
Abandoning my flipflops and possibly my dignity, I adjust my towel and join the gleeful crowd of more than 200 naked people rushing into the eighty-five-degree Celsius sauna to a blaring remix of “Losing It” by the DJ Fisher.
Adding to the chaos is the voice of presenter Sabine Rauh. “Let me remind you of the audience rules,” she announces over the sound system while a team of dancing ushers (clothed) directs spectators vying for spots on six levels of wooden benches in the Colosseum-shaped sauna, capacity 300. “Please, no talking during the show. Clapping is fine, but no whistling—it distracts the performers.” Rauh’s friendly-but-strict tone evokes her career as a flight attendant. “Everyone can fit. Put towel next to towel. Popo next to popo. Don’t worry about a little sweat from your neighbour—everyone will take a shower afterwards.”
If the cacophony isn’t enough of a clue that this will be no ordinary sweat experience, the jumbo video screen is a solid spoiler. Around the sauna’s five-metre-long rock oven are a handful of props; two hobby horses, an old record player, fake cacti, and a toy chest give the space a Western vibe.
The heat tingles my skin, but it could also be nerves and patriotism for Xavier and Zacharie Drouin-Hill, two brothers from Gatineau, Quebec, who are about to compete in the world sauna theatre championship. It is the first time Canadians are vying for the world title alongside more than a hundred competitors from nineteen countries.
Technically, the competition is called the “Aufguss WM” or “Aufguss Weltmeisterschaft,” a German term whose direct translation—Infusion World Championship—is neither illuminating nor precise but does speak to the event’s origins in 2007 in the German-speaking Italian Alps. “I’d describe it as a Broadway show, except in the sauna,” says Alycia Wong, a spectator who lives in Colorado. The American competitors are also first timers on the world sauna theatre stage. “You’ve got props, light, set design, music. You’ve got comedy. You’ve got drama. There are also aromas, towel moves, and choreography. When the beat drops, you get so wrapped up into the story that you just start cheering and stop noticing the heat.”
Now it’s the Drouin-Hill brothers’ turn to take the stage. The lights dim. Even before the show begins, I am already sweating profusely—as is almost everyone else.
Three months before, in June, at the Thermea Spa Village in Whitby, Ontario, the Drouin-Hill brothers won the Canadian national title, in the duo division, with a fifteen-minute program entitled “A Brotherly Western.” Another Quebecois, Jad Maalouf, twenty-two, won the Canadian singles division with a Peter Pan fan fiction program, “The Acceptance of Growth,” where the famous boy returns to Neverland.
“When I tell people what I do, they think I’m a crazy person,” says Xavier, twenty-four, when I first interview the three competitors for Canada at Nordik Spa Village in Chelsea, Quebec, where they all work in the sauna area. “Maybe it’s a weird competition, but it’s such a fun competition,” adds Zacharie, twenty-eight.
Much like figure skating, Aufguss WM competitors are evaluated on both the artistry of a performance as well as its technical difficulty and execution, explains Lasse Eriksen, vice president of the Aufguss WM organization.
Twelve judges, sitting through eighty performances over seven days, evaluate the storyline and acting, as well as the ability of the competitors to execute the Aufguss infusion ritual. This is normally a peaceful, aromatic ceremony, performed at many saunas across Europe and a few in Canada. During “classic Aufguss,” sauna masters first create scented steam by putting snowballs impregnated with essential oils—eucalyptus, mandarin, lavender—on the sauna oven’s rocks. Then, accompanied by relaxing music, they wave towels in elegant motions to distribute the scented air around the hot room.
Although there are world competitions for this more traditional ceremony, the Aufguss WM “adds a little drama—maybe a lot of drama—and towel tricks to the traditional ritual,” Eriksen explains. By towel tricks, he means acrobatic stunts such as the Pizza Spin (an airborne spinning towel instead of pizza dough), the Tasmanian Devil (a wild, around-the-body towel spin and toss), Around the Universe (where the towel is spun one-handed around the body), and Angel Wings (spinning the towel over each shoulder to create seraphic limbs), to name just a few.
Some performances feature spinoffs of classic stories. Other competitors opt for offbeat tales; some they’ve written themselves. One of the Japanese teams, Minami Shakeyama and Takumi Kubota, played out a future where an orphan is cared for by her late father’s AI robot creation. Slovakia’s Kevin Gajdica performed a documentary of his own scripting, based on the true story of a Slovakian emigrant to Pennsylvania who is horrified by an airplane crash and designs a parachute prototype, which he patents in 1914 but cannot commercialize, ultimately returning to Slovakia in obscurity, with others’ designs becoming lifesavers during World War II.
Hendrik and Florian Bisslich, two brothers from Germany, performed a gangster-inspired team routine based on the British Peaky Blinders TV series, in which Florian yells, “You killed my mother. I’m not going to let you kill my fucking brother!” A Romanian duo performed a burlesque rivalry between an old diva and a saucy newcomer, both wearing sequin dresses and strappy high heels. The crowd went wild when they nailed towel tricks under cancan legs, as well as when the older diva admonished, “You’re playing with fire,” and the hot newcomer retorted, “I am the fire,” as she mic-dropped something combustible hidden in her hands onto the sauna rocks so that it ignited into flame.
The Netherlands’ Sigrid van Rijswijk landed the event’s most rarefied special effects trick—and ultimately earned herself a gold medal in the singles division—when she used her character’s witchy powers to magically fling open boxes on stage containing two towels, which then sprung out and flew six feet through the air into her hands, as if moved by dark forces.
Notably absent from the event are competitors from sauna-loving Finland. In the Aufguss WM’s two-decade history, the country has never sent a competitor, Eriksen says. Many in the country think Aufguss theatre disrupts the dignity of the Finnish sauna; in 2020, the Finnish sauna received UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage designation, alluding to its traditional consideration as “a sacred space—a ‘church of nature.’” I once asked Risto Elomaa, the Finnish president of the International Sauna Association, what he thought of the Aufguss WM competition, and he retorted immediately, “I hate Aufguss theatre.” For him, the sauna should be a place to relax, to sweat, to reflect—not to cheer wildly or to do a naked version of the wave.
Aufguss theatre is certainly campy and not in an outdoorsy way; if saunas are a sanctuary, then these competitions might seem blasphemous to sauna sticklers. When I make this argument to Eriksen, who also manages a luxury spa on Oslo’s coastline and is a board member of the International Sauna Association, he argues there’s a time and place for all kinds of sauna, from Norway’s serene bastu sweat-bathing culture to more expressive incarnations, like Aufguss theatre.
“I’ve said to them [the Finns], ‘Come on—you shouldn’t be afraid of losing your own sauna culture by trying something new like the Aufguss,” Eriksen says. The Finnish boycott at the Aufguss WM may soon be over, he adds, as some in the country have expressed interest in competing at the Aufguss WM in 2027.
Under the dim lights, as the crowd settles for the Canadian entrée to take the world stage, I adjust my towel to preserve a semblance of modesty across the front of my body and survey the audience. Most spectators are baring all their fleshy glory. Bathing suits are strictly prohibited at the event: many in the Central European sauna world object to the chemical off-gassing of synthetic textiles in the extreme heat, and that sweat and body odour cling to the materials.
But while sauna nudity is commonplace in Germany and the Netherlands, where the Aufguss WM is normally held, “in Italy, it is forbidden by law to be naked in public—it’s a criminal penalty,” says local organizer and previous Aufguss WM competitor Paolo Dell’Omo. “This was a big nightmare.” The Aquardens administration didn’t want to fall foul of the law, he explains, but the Aufguss WM organizing committee didn’t want to tell the hundreds of ticket holders that they’d have to suit up. The solution: erect two-metre-high white fences around the sauna area and hire a security person to ensure the unclothed stay in the secluded zone.
Amid enforced deshabille, sartorial expression in the sauna world comes courtesy of felt hats, which are worn to keep the head insulated from the sauna’s extreme heat and protect hair from getting damaged. Some show love for their country by wearing sauna hat flags, but many more choose to be flamboyant: I see Roman centurion helmets, rooster heads, sombreros, DJ headphones, Viking helmets, and, my personal favourite, a hot-pink pig head.
Suddenly, everything turns dark, and the sound of an explosion thunders over the loudspeakers as the jumbo video screen shows the Big Bang against a starry sky. After a few seconds in darkness, we hear a creaking saloon door opening as jaunty piano music plays on the speakers. The Drouin-Hill brothers tumble into the sauna in the full throes of a childhood sibling squabble. “C’mon let’s play a game . . . You promised mom!” implores Zacharie, chasing Xavier. Their matching jeans and shirts, lean frames, and long, brown, wavy hair make it hard to tell them apart. That is, until Xavier, thanks to some playful deceit, scores the sheriff’s star and convinces Zacharie to don a bandana in the role of outlaw. Adding leather vests and toy guns to their ensemble, the brothers begin acting out a Spaghetti Western storyline while simultaneously executing the traditional sauna Aufguss ritual.
First, the brothers pour water over sauna rocks, leading to a blast of steam that makes the space feel even hotter. Then, they rummage in the toy box and remove two cowboy hats, each containing a large snowball. Hats go on heads and snowballs on the hot rocks. Cedar, black pepper, and orange waft over me as the twangy opening chords of Lorne Greene’s “I’m a Gun” start on the sound system.
With impressive synchronization, Zacharie and Xavier pick up folded towels, spin them around like helicopter rotors to further distribute the aroma around the sauna, and then completely unfold the terrycloth in unison to begin their towel dance.
Some sauna masters, such as Xavier, prefer using the term “towel routine” or “towel waving” to confer gravitas to the complicated choreography that makes this part of the show a competitive sport. One of the reigning Aufguss WM champions, the Slovak sauna master Róbert Židek, told me he finds the performances more physically challenging than the competitive soccer he used to play before an injury drew him into sauna work. “It’s only fifteen minutes,” he says, “but you are focusing on the acting, connecting with the audience, the Aufguss ritual, the towel tricks, moving the air around a huge sauna—and it’s so hot.”
At first, the Drouin-Hill brothers’ towel moves are simple. After the Helicopter, they thrust the towels up and down to push hot, scented air collecting at the top of the sauna downward and cooler air pooling at the bottom of the sauna upward—the temperature variation between floor and ceiling can be a difference of ten degrees or more.
By the end of their performance, the audience is cheering wildly while the brothers and their outfits are drenched in sweat. As everyone plods out of the heat to cool down in the enormous shower room and snow alcove, many well wishers line up to hug or high-five the brothers, who are catching their breath near a cold-plunge tub.
“The Canadian brothers’ show was really fun—I liked it when they rode the hobby horses while spinning the towels in the air,” says Andreas Jespersen, a cheery Danish Aufguss enthusiast from Copenhagen, who is sporting a green sauna hat with googly frog eyes that add several inches to his tall frame. “And I really related to the sibling rivalry—it reminded me of my own family growing up.”
Ultimately, the Drouin-Hill brothers didn’t medal. “The Canadians this year should be proud,” Eriksen says. “So what if they didn’t win? They will always be their country’s first Aufguss world competitors—they are already in the history books.”
The brothers, still flushed from the performance’s workout, head to the shade to recover. “I’m so happy people laughed. We had some really good comedic moments, which is what we were going for,” Zacharie says, starting to extricate himself from his drenched leather vest.
Xavier sits on the ground, weary but smiling. “Wow, that was really hot.”
Sarah Everts is the author of The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration. She has written for the Guardian, Scientific American, and Time.
