Professor David Peimer
Heroes and Villains: Jesus and Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar
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Summary
This presentation will look at how the famous musical portrays Jesus and Judas as hero and villain, and how binaries and the entertainment world combine to make popular musicals. Do they perpetuate stereotypes about Jewish people or is the musical merely a freewheeling set of catchy tunes about iconically known historical figures from an ancient story? We will also ask: did the musical almost foresee how myth/story feed our contemporary celebrity-obsessed culture or was it an ironic satire on “superstars”?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.