A Review of Perfect Sweat: Can Sauna Save the World?
“The sauna can save the world.”
–Mikkel Aaland
Sauna has different meanings for different generations of people. When we built our backyard sauna (which we dubbed Bad Sauna in honor of our Swedish roots and Finnish tradition), my mother-in-law, who grew up in a small town around plenty of Finnish immigrants and their saunas, raised an eyebrow. In her recollections, saunas were sometimes bad places where her father, the town’s chief of police, had to break up boozy fights. It should be noted that this most likely occurred in lumber camps and not on family farms. Additionally, her grandfather was a plumber who personally installed a bathtub in her family’s house–a point of progress and pride for folks who formerly had no indoor plumbing. She could not imagine why in 2020 we would want a sauna in the backyard.
In a new broadcast series titled Perfect Sweat, author and photographer Mikkel Aaland documents the current state of sauna around the world. He examines the turnover of generational trends and makes the point that the experiences that put us most in touch with our own humanity endure. Sweat bathing is certainly one of these. When we heard that Perfect Sweat, hosted by Aaland, would be available to stream we took the opportunity to watch it this summer. We had to get the Eventive TV app and pay about $30 for the seven episode show.
Mikkel Aaland (his Norwegian name is pronounced Oh-land) is a baby boomer, born and raised in California’s Bay Area. He is a photographer and author who has made a name for himself as a documentarian of sauna and sweat bathing culture. His book Sweat came out in 1978 and was at the leading edge of a renewed interest and appreciation of sauna practices. The show follows Aaland as he revisits the places that make up his first book. There were 7 episodes in our streaming package, each following him to countries around the world. In each place he visits, he partners with a young native host–there is an obvious emphasis here on the youth factor–who leads Aaland through adventures and explains the history and evolving culture of sweat bathing practices. Each episode also has local directors and production crew. The series itself is a product of Seattle-based Bray’s Run Productions. For sauna enthusiasts like me, they have other offerings I look forward to viewing including their Sauna Channel.
Finland
The opening episode of Perfect Sweat finds Aaland returning in 2018 to Finland where he lived for nine months in 1978. He notes, “A lot has changed.” Indeed, his Finnish host, a fit and youthful Samuel Aarnio, marketing professional and sauna enthusiast, could be considered the new face of sauna in contrast to the working class woman in front of Helsinki’s Bad Sauna over 100 years ago. Aaland notes that there has been a “rebirth” of sauna in Finland, it is now popular as “young people reclaim sauna’s public space.”
Highlights of this episode include a visit by Aaland and Aarnio to Sompasauna in Helsinki, a free-for-all type of public sauna, which is literally “always free, open to anyone and has no staff.” etc. I was intrigued by their visit to a former Cold War “secret sauna” called Villa Upinniemi where former Finnish president Urho Kekkonen conducted “sauna diplomacy” during the tense years of the Cold War. (More on this by watching the Finnish TV show Shadow Lines set in spy-infested 1950’s Helsinki.) Aaland and Aarnio are met at Villa Upinniemi by Professor Juha Pentikainen described here as a “living legend” and scholar known for his writings on sauna and Finnish shamanism. What I really found dreamy was the segment about the simple rustic saunas that can be found and fired up by anyone on some of Finland’s more than 180,000 islands–what a day to sail out to a small, rocky island, take a sauna and enjoy a picnic! My overall impression is that sauna culture in Finland is undergoing a transformation from something as mundane as your weekly bath with family and neighbors, to something more open to creative interpretation, more public and commercial.
Stay tuned for my reviews of more Perfect Sweat episodes on Aufguss, Russia, Japan, Turkey, Norway
and Burning Man.
Comments
Post a Comment