Slate: The New Hotness

The sport of aufguss, or competitive sauna, is full of surprises.

It was the hottest day of the year in New York City. Oddly, that wasn’t why I was half naked.

And it’s not why I was surrounded by nearly 100 bodies in equal or greater states of undress. We were all in a 175-degree sauna, where partial nakedness is not unusual. What was unusual was what we were all doing there: watching two artists perform an interpretive dance.

Welcome to the Aufguss USA Nationals, America’s first Aufguss World Masters event, a two-day competition held at Brooklyn’s Bathhouse. It was late June, and the nation’s best sauna experts had flown in to show off their skills in aufguss, a blend of dance, sport, theater, therapy, and aerodynamic manipulation so odd it could only come from Germany. I was witnessing, for lack of a more succinct description, competitive sauna–ing.

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