Aufguss World Championships in Europe

Aufguss World Championships in Europe

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.

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.” Quoted from the site page mofongos https://www.royalspacolumbia.com/