User:Urve/Madame Nielsen

Madame Nielsen (born Claus Beck-Nielsen) is a Danish writer, singer, actor, and performance artist.

Early life and education
Nielsen was born in 1963 in Denmark.

Career
In the 1990s, Nielsen joined the New York Wooster Group, an experimental theater.

Between late 2000 and early 2001, Nielsen adopted the identity of an amnesiac named Claus Nielsen. Her wife divorced her shortly afterwards, and Nielsen declared the identity of Claus Beck-Nielsen dead. She assumed various names and roles, including the position of managing the theater Das Beckwerk and Beck-Nielsen's work.

As Beckwerk's manager, she continued participating in the theater's creative production. In 2004, Nielsen and her colleague at Das Beckwerk, Rasmussen, visited Iraq during its invasion by the United States and brought Democracy with them: A metal box with the word democracy written on it. After their visit to Iraq – which the art professor Laura Luise Schultz described as a success in which "people welcomed them with open arms" – Rasmussen and Nielsen also visited the United States (described by Schultz as a failure), Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt.