AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Every August, millions of people gather in Edinburgh, Scotland, for the Fringe, the world's largest performing arts festival. It's famous for pushing the boundaries of storytelling. Reporter Rebecca Rosman found evidence for that inside one of the festival's newest and hottest performance spaces.
REBECCA ROSMAN, BYLINE: Theater in a sauna - yep, a sauna. Yes, those wooden rooms with hot coals and temperatures reaching up to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Omer Telli is an Edinburgh-based dentist here for the show.
OMER TELLI: Came last week, I'm back for more.
ROSMAN: A repeat customer - interesting.
TELLI: You feel relaxed, and you can fully immerse yourself in the experience.
ROSMAN: This afternoon session is billed as a bewitching reimagining of the Virginia Woolf novel "The Waves."
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I went and took all my....
ROSMAN: Spectators change into bathing suits and file into the 82-seat sauna. And then...
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly (ph)...
JAMES GRIEVE: Just incredible to witness.
ROSMAN: That's James Grieve. He and Sauna Sessions Arts Club co-founder Lucy Osborne came up with this idea several years ago while working in Sweden, where they fell in love with the country's sauna traditions.
LUCY OSBORNE: And we just gradually started to think about the similarities between sauna spaces and theater spaces.
GRIEVE: A sauna is a mini auditorium, and everyone's gathered around a stove. And like theater - the origins of that, we think of human beings sitting around campfires telling stories.
ROSMAN: The sauna is a real performance space here at the fringe, with programming that ranges from morning raves to Scottish storytelling. After Edinburgh, it will travel around the U.K. and its founders hope, eventually, to the U.S.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) The air ripples above the trees.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I burn. I shiver.
ROSMAN: The sauna session is divided into three 10-minute intervals. In between, the audience is invited to dip into a cold plunge pool. Brian Huther was one of the first to jump in. Being in a sauna means you're pushed to a physical limit. And Huther says that experience reaches him in a way ordinary theater doesn't.
BRIAN HUTHER: Most theater and novels are going to engage with your brain at the level of meaning but not sending messages to your body that this is also important to it. So I think that it really does something there. I mean, I felt very emotional in there.
ROSMAN: It was emotional. It was hot. It was cold. And then hot again. It was theater for all the senses. Rebecca Rosman, NPR News, Edinburgh. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.