This workshop was part of the Austrian Soccer Union’s (ÖFB) UEFA Pro Diploma training, their highest possible trainer’s license. The goal of the workshop was to offer future high-end soccer trainers artistic tools that would give them a few more more options for action in the challenging situations of interviews, press conferences and other public speech settings, so what we actually did was a media training grounded in artistic experiences. The workshop was developed in collaboration with Thomas Eidler, the manager of the ÖFB’s Trainers Academy and media consultant Wolfgang Gramann.
We worked on dramatic world literature: A scence by William Shakespeare, namely the hazardous speech of Marc Antony at the funeral of the murdered Julius Cesar in the play “Julius Cesar”. We followed the idea of anticipating a “most difficult case” for a public speech in the theatrical sort of simulation that we do in acting, we walked through it, shed light on it from different angles, tried different options, and slowly got to know the territory, even started to get quite comfortable with it, to have fun with it, and to play with it. That is how we created a little concise experiential prototype case for future public speech situations. Maybe this could make future situations easier and could even keep them within the boundaries of a now widened comfort zone.