It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday, and the sunlight is fading over Domino Park in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. “Do you like rock ‘n’ roll?” asks Adrian Manolache as he steps into the 75-person sauna set up for the Sauna Festival, an 18-day event taking place along the Brooklyn waterfront hosted by Culture of Bathe-ing — an organization sponsored by Therme Group. A few mutters escape from the crowd of some two dozen sweating bodies sitting on four levels of wooden benches. He presses play on a boombox, sending the twangy opening notes of Dire Straits’s “Sultans of Swing” into the steamy air.
For the next 15 minutes or so, Mr. Manolache, 31, a sauna master from Therme Bucharest, a spa in Romania, leads an aufguss — an interactive sauna experience that incorporates various elements selected by the guide. Some sessions are more elaborate, integrating colored lights, costumes or fans. But Mr. Manolache, who is wearing loosefitting black pants and nothing else, is always moving, spinning a simple white towel overhead like a flag, twirling it up in the air like a baton and dribbling it between his legs like a basketball to circulate the heavy heat. Occasionally, he steps up on the sauna bench to be closer to the crowd, flapping his towel to the beat. It can be hard to breathe amid the sweltering sauna heat, which hovers between 165 and 194 degrees Fahrenheit, but he moves with ease — at times you can even see him grinning.
It takes months of training to become an aufgussmeister, or sauna master. “It is physically demanding,” Mr. Manolache wrote in an email. “Performing in temperatures that often exceed 90 degrees (Celsius) while maintaining precision, control and connection with the audience requires endurance and discipline. I train regularly — cardio, breath control, mobility and strength to maintain stamina.”
Mr. Manolache’s was one of 12 aufguss sessions taking place that day, and there were 250 scheduled throughout the duration of the festival, which runs from Feb. 18 through March 1. There are several other offerings, including sound baths, meditation sessions, traditional Slavic banya experiences and lectures on queer bathhouse architecture, scheduled across 15 different sauna stations throughout the festival.
Teams of sauna masters who make a living from sweating in rooms with strangers were invited Stateside from Europe to participate in the festival. The word “aufguss” translates to “infusion” in German, and part of the idea is to distract those in the sauna from the heat.
Robert Hammond, a founder of Culture of Bathe-ing, said his first aufguss experience converted him into a sauna fan.
“I’d always liked saunas, but saunas are hard to sit through,” Mr. Hammond said. With aufguss, time flies by, he said. “It’s not like I talked to the people next to me, necessarily, but it made me feel more connected with the people in the room, like we went through a joint experience together,” he added.
For the remainder of his session, Mr. Manolache queued up a soundtrack with the song, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Before each track, he dissolved a snowball infused with essential oils — lemon, Douglas fir and nutmeg — on the hot stove, creating a heavy steam that fogged up the windows. It was an intensely sensory journey, eliciting looks of delight and awe from the crowd. It even moved several young men to join in: “I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain? Coming down on a sunny day,” they sang, as Mr. Manolache whipped his towel.
“The guy walked in and he was wearing an aufguss world champion sweatshirt,” Corey Scheinfeld, 25, a software engineer who lives in Williamsburg, said, “and I was like, ‘This is going to be great. I’m in the right place right here.’”
A recent devotee of saunas after having shoulder surgery, Mr. Scheinfeld said this was his second visit to the festival. He brought his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day, he said, and they had “the best Valentine’s Day ever.” Some of the performances, he said, left him feeling giddy, so he returned the next weekend with friends.
“There’s no place we would rather be than with each other, in a sauna, sweating it out,” Mr. Scheinfeld said.
Caeli Harr, 30, an account executive at Salesforce, decided to stop by the festival after watching the structures being built through the window of her friend’s apartment in a building nearby. The session with Mr. Manolache was her first aufguss experience. What did she think? “It definitely had a funny, sexy vibe,” she said.
Mr. Hammond said he didn’t have immediate plans to make the Sauna Festival into an annual event, focusing instead on promoting local spas and evangelizing bathing and sauna culture — he has even created a Google map of current and soon-to-be-open saunas in New York. “Aufguss is part of sauna culture,” Hammond said, “but it’s not as widely known in the U.S.,” adding that there are not many spas offering aufguss in the country. Those looking to delve further might consider the aufguss world championships, which will be held in Berlin this September.
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