Sauna Theatre

Sauna Theatre will launch in August 2026 as part of Summerhall Arts’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe lineup. It will be open every day from 9am – 11pm with an eclectic programme encompassing everything from a morning sauna rave to ancient rituals, a literary salon to an evening Arts Club – the hottest club in town.  Sauna Theatre will also be showcasing some of the world’s best Aufguss artists.

To create the venue, we’ve travelled across Europe and Asia to study sauna precedents, and we’ve spoken directly with sauna masters and leading ritual practitioners.  Those conversations have shaped every detail of the experience; from heat and airflow, to bench geometry, lighting, and the audience journey into and out of the space.

The result is a new kind of cultural venue – a sauna and a performance space – and the first of its kind in the UK. Built to move, Sauna Theatre is modular, demountable, and portable, meaning it can pop up anywhere. In the future, it will become the heart of an itinerant sauna arts festival, touring and transforming sites around the UK.

Find out more about Sauna Theatre here

From the studio three sixty Journal, here’s an article James Grieve wrote about his first encounter with the extraordinary sauna native artform Aufguss and the epiphany that saunas and theatres are kindred spaces…

The Guardian: Hot Ticket: UK’s first sauna theatre draws swimwear-clad audiences 

The design of Sauna Theatre is a collaboration between studio three sixty and Sauna Sessions Arts Club, a new venture founded by Lucy Osborne (Director of studio three sixty) and James Grieve.