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Archaos founder who reinvented circus as an edgy art form for the industrial world

Pierrot Bidon, who has died of cancer aged 56, will be best remembered for creating the cult circus troupe Archaos, one of the ensembles that galvanised the new circus movement, in which traditional arts have been re-imagined and combined with contemporary artistic sensibilities and theatrical techniques.

"The welding torch, when it is used at night," said Bidon, "is a very beautiful thing, is it not? Why not use it in a circus?" Instead of sawdust, the Archaos circus ring had the air of a factory floor. The troupe cast their spell with a show that broke every rule. Traditional circus was all sequins, ivory juggling clubs, velvet and spandex. Bidon's big departure, which resonates to this day in everything from Cirque du Soleil to the Trash City and Shangri-La fields at the Glastonbury festival, was to arm his performers with oxy-acetylene torches, motorbikes and semtex, and clad his performers in boiler suits and corrugated iron. Crash helmets replaced red noses; topless trapeze artists swung from forklift trucks and huge cranes inside a tent hung with white ropes like a gigantic spider's web. Fire-eating performers in leather thongs and grotesque eyeliner coughed up flames that singed the front rows. It was visceral, grungy, primeval and anarchic; Bidon had created entertainment that took the audience to the edge.

Gone were the circus barons of Chipperfield, Knie and the conventional handouts of the Moscow State Circus. In their place, and brandishing an oxy-acetylene torch to attract attention, Archaos brought the spirit of a mad, paranoid and punch-drunk industrial society to the ring with a verve and a passion that appealed as much to children and (steely-nerved) parents as it did to intellectuals and minimalist aesthetes.

"New circus is more traditional than other circus," said Bidon. "Ordinary circus has become incorporated. It's dull. People are in it for the money and the spirit suffers. What we have tried to do is recapture the spirit and the passion of performing."

Bidon was born in Le Mans, in north-west France, and educated in the town, though he bunked off school, preferring to learn circus skills on the streets, where he performed prior to forming Cirque Bidon in 1975. This was a traditional travelling circus with 25 horses and caravans that toured the villages and small towns of France and Italy – Bidon, a diminutive and mischievous man, walked the tightrope for it.

After 10 years, Bidon decided circus had been stagnant as an art form for too long. He wanted to reinvent it for the industrial world. In 1986, the troupe changed its name from Circus Bidon to Archaos ("beginning"), and set about redefining the limits of what was possible in a late-20th-century spectacle. Based in a 300-year-old glass factory in Alès, a small town between Avignon and Montpelier in the south of France, the ensemble made all their own equipment – even the Chapiteau de Cordes, the delicate web of white ropes strung below the tent roof.

Archaos was a family and Bidon its patriarch. Members of the troupe came from all walks of life and he exuded an abundance of warmth that encompassed them all. "No one here was born in a circus," Bidon said. "But we all grew up in the street."

Archaos was first seen in Britain in 1988 at the Festival of New Circus in Jubilee Gardens, on London's South Bank. After the success of this show, the producer, Adrian Evans, was eager to turn the show's impetus into ticket sales. Keen to extend the show's run on Clapham Common, he suggested that I promote the show. Pierrot and I took it to the streets, hijacking media interest. Cars were split in half in shopping centres, motorbikes leapt over stationary traffic in Edinburgh. When the Bristol press persuaded the city fathers to ban Archaos, Pierrot was stoic, perceiving the advantages of a ban; it propelled Archaos to an international audience.

The shows grew in stature around Europe and Scandinavia and, in 1991, Archaos was on course to storm North America. But, just before the run commenced in New York, Archaos imploded. The Metal Clown show encountered financial difficulties after the tent was destroyed by gales in the Dublin festival. This, combined with a number of artistic differences, led to the company's demise.

After a brief rest in South America, Bidon returned to Britain to collaborate with the Generating Company, Peter Gabriel and Mark Fisher, and in 1998 create a show for the Millennium Experience, at the Millennium Dome. Bidon specialised in creating shows through workshops and in developing street performance. In Brazil, he created Circo da Madrugada, born out of workshops that were part of a social programme helping the dispossessed in shantytowns. In 1998, he had a prolonged stay in Conakry, Guinea, where he established Circus Baobab, an African extravaganza of dancing, acrobatics, juggling and clowning powered by west African music.

Aside from the circus, Bidon travelled the world working on large public celebrations and spectacles, from events in China to the Eurostar St Pancras Terminal opening ceremony in London.

The world of circus would not have reinvented itself for the 21st century so quickly or stylishly without Bidon's warmth, generosity and fearlessness. Friends tell me that his final act was to give the peace and love sign in one hand, and to offer the third finger – to life, death or whoever – on the other.

He is survived by his wife, Ana, and his sons Pedro and Antonio.

• Pierrot Bidon (Pierric Pillot), cirus performer and director, born 1 January 1954; died 9 March 2010

Former SNP leader, he transformed his party into a modern political force

Billy Wolfe, who has died aged 86, helped transform the Scottish National party (SNP) from a romantic movement into the modern political force which now enjoys minority government in the Scottish parliament.

A gentle and quiet chartered accountant, he was also a politician with a passion for Scottish history and culture which convinced him that, because Scotland was a nation, it should behave like one and have its own independent government. He dedicated his political career to this end, joining the SNP in 1959 and earning early recognition when he fought the 1962 West Lothian by- election. Though he had no prospect of success, he came a surprising second to the arch-unionist Labour MP Tam Dalyell, thanks to a 23% swing.

This early indication of Scottish nationalism's ability to threaten the union provoked a temporary upsurge in support for the SNP, leading to the party's sensational Hamilton byelection success with Winnie Ewing in 1967. Wolfe's decade of leadership, from 1969, included the SNP's greatest period of success in Westminster when, in October 1974, it boasted 11 MPs, although he was disappointed not to be one of them.

This breakthrough prompted Harold Wilson to conclude that Scotland should have some form of devolution. Wilson remarked that he was not worried by the SNP's 11 seats, but he was alarmed by the party's 40 second places. So began years of constitutional argument culminating in the establishment of the Scottish parliament, in Holyrood, where the SNP won power in 2007.

Billy was born in Bathgate, West Lothian, educated at George Watson's college, Edinburgh, and qualified as a chartered accountant. He served towards the end of the second world war with the Scottish Horse Regiment. It was his postwar persistence in challenging Dalyell over six general elections that earned him recognition as a tenacious campaigner. Though he never defeated Dalyell (the two remained on good terms), he did over this series of contests formulate a clear sense of purpose for the SNP, with some much-needed organisation and discipline.

In the early 1960s he was active in CND, campaigning against the arrival of a US Polaris fleet of nuclear weapons on the Clyde, and became Scottish CND's treasurer for four years from 1982. His early CND activity coincided with a period in Scottish politics when nationalism found itself able to co-exist with much of the Scottish left on issues such as nuclear disarmament. Wolfe recognised the advantages in persuading the SNP to be anti-nuclear, which it remains today, and to position itself to the left of centre, where his party and his successors as leaders have found themselves at ease.

Wolfe was credited with commissioning the familiar SNP yellow and black logo encompassing the thistle and Saltire, which is still in use today, and he invented the campaign slogan "Put Scotland First", which enjoyed fleeting success in several elections. During his leadership the party membership increased spectacularly. By the end of the 60s he had become the SNP's senior vice-chairman, before replacing Arthur Donaldson as party leader in 1969. But after the successes of the 70s, the party's fortunes dipped again as the Thatcher era dawned. Wolfe stepped down as leader in 1979 after the failure of the first devolution referendum and a disappointing general election for nationalism. He became party president in 1980 and remained an activist in senior posts until 2008.

His influence on the party had been loosened after 1979 as factionalism in the SNP left it bumping along the bottom in opinion polls during the early 1980s. But his residual legacy was strong enough to ensure the SNP benefited from its social democratic ideals, leaving it well-positioned to knock out Conservative MPs, while still offering a broad enough church to disillusioned Labour voters in Westminster and Holyrood elections.

Wolfe supported a range of cultural organisations in Scotland and wrote poetry in the Scots language. He wrote a semi-autobiographical book, Scotland Lives: The Quest for Independence, in 1971. He is survived by his wife, Kate, and by four children from a previous marriage.

• William (Billy) Cuthbertson Wolfe, politician; born 22 February, 1924; died 19 March, 2010

Leading statesman and architect of democracy in Nepal

Girija Koirala, who has died aged 85 of a chest infection, played a dominant role in Nepalese politics from 1990 up to the installation of a Maoist-led government in April 2008, serving five times as prime minister. Politically active since the late 1940s, he was the youngest of three brothers to hold that office, and the last significant survivor of the generation of political activists who, in 1950, brought down the shogunate – with the Rana family in control of the power of the monarchy as hereditary regents – and began the country's first experiment with parliamentary democracy.

Though Koirala was a centrist, he went on to become a champion of the peace process that saw the abolition of the monarchy and brought the Maoists into electoral politics after a civil war in which more than 13,000 people died. At the time of his death, he was still trying to secure a new constitution.

He was born in the north Indian state of Bihar, where his father, Krishna Prasad Koirala, a hill Brahman who had angered Maharaja Chandra Shamsher Rana, was in exile. Though the family was permitted to return to Nepal after Chandra's death in 1929, Koirala was privately educated in India, and as a teenager, he followed his father and elder brothers Matrika and Bisheshwar ("BP") into both the Indian nationalist movement and the struggle against the Ranas in Nepal. In March 1947, he was an organiser of a strike in a jute mill at the border town of Biratnagar, and he was one of the leaders of the column that captured the town when the India-based Nepali Congress party launched its armed movement in November 1950.

After a settlement brokered by India at the beginning of 1951 transferred power from the Rana family to King Tribhuvan, Koirala worked in the Congress party organisation as head of the youth wing and joined the party's central working committee in July 1958. Like his brother BP, who had led the Congress government elected in 1959, he was imprisoned after Tribhuvan's son, Mahendra, abolished the parliamentary system in 1960 and replaced it with palace-dominated "Panchayat democracy". In Mahendra's model, panchayats (traditional councils) were directly elected, sometimes on just a show of hands, at the lowest level, and the members at each level would elect the members of the next level up.

Released in January 1968, Girija joined his brother in self-imposed exile in India in 1971, returning to Nepal in December 1976. By early 1978, he was describing himself as general secretary of the party, probably after nomination to the post by BP, although he later claimed to have been elected in 1976. He campaigned for a return to multiparty democracy in the 1980 referendum that narrowly endorsed the panchayat system.

With his senior colleagues Ganeshman Singh and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, the acting party president, Koirala was a member of the troika to whom BP entrusted the party shortly before his death in 1983. Generally more conservative than the other two, Girija was initially hesitant about the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy launched by Congress in spring 1990. However, the success of the street protests led to his appointment as prime minister in May 1991, when Congress won an overall victory in the election but interim prime minister Bhattarai failed to win in his own constituency. Koirala became the focus of protests by leftists and was soon at odds with both Bhattarai and Singh; internal party conflict centred mainly on patronage for ministerial appointments, though Koirala was felt by some to be moving too far from the socialist ideology of BP. In July 1994, he called mid-term polls, but he backed away from a showdown and agreed with Bhattarai that both factions should contest the election together. Congress nevertheless lost and the Unified Marxist-Leninists (UML), previously the main opposition, formed a minority government.

After helping engineer the fall of the UML government in September 1995, Koirala allowed his junior colleague Sher Bahadur Deuba to head a Congress-led coalition, while he succeeded Bhattarai as party president in May 1996. Deuba's administration, which witnessed the beginning of the Maoist insurgency, fell in March 1997 and was followed by two other unstable coalitions. Koirala regained the premiership in April 1998, first at the head of a Congress minority government and then in coalitions with the left.

In the campaign for the May 1999 election, Koirala secured party unity by endorsing Bhattarai as candidate for prime minister, but in March 2000 made use of his personal support among Congress MPs to supplant him. He cited as justification Bhattarai's failure to contain the Maoist insurgency, but he had no more success himself.

From February 2001 onwards, Koirala was the target of opposition disruption in parliament and protests over corruption. Early in June this was overshadowed by Crown Prince Dipendra's gunning down of King Birendra and eight other members of his family before his own apparent suicide. In July, when the army refused to follow his order to intervene and release 69 policemen abducted by the Maoists, Koirala resigned and was succeeded by Deuba, who began negotiations with the rebels.

After the Maoists pulled out of talks and attacked the army in November 2001, Koirala backed Deuba's handling of the crisis. However, in April 2002, it was reported that he secretly met the Maoist leader Pushpa Kumar Dahal in New Delhi. That summer the party's central committee, with a majority of Koirala's supporters, instructed Deuba not to renew the state of emergency. Deuba responded in May 2002 by requesting a dissolution and set up his own breakaway party. In October 2002, when Deuba sought the postponement of the elections, King Gyanendra dismissed him, and then appointed three governments on his own.

In February 2005, the king took control of the administration. Koirala was put under arrest, but was released in April and, in collaboration with leaders of other parties, reached an understanding with the Maoists in Delhi in November 2005. Joint protests in April 2006 forced the king to reinstate the dissolved 1999 parliament, and Koirala became prime minister again, leading a coalition which the Maoists joined in April 2007. Once the interim constitution was adopted in January 2007, Koirala began exercising the functions of head of state and later that year accepted a Maoist demand that Nepal be declared a republic, with only implementation of the decision left to the constituent assembly.

He probably delayed preparations for constituent assembly elections, originally scheduled for June 2007, hoping that support for the Maoists would ebb. There was a further delay because of demands by regional activists, and the challenge presented by the emergence of the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF) at the head of a powerful regional movement in the eastern part of the Tarai plains. Koirala, whose health had long been a problem, did not stand in the elections, which were finally held in April 2008 and which saw many of his relatives defeated in their stronghold in the eastern Tarai, while the Maoists became the largest party in the assembly.

Koirala had wanted to become first president of the new republic, but this was opposed by the Maoists. In mid-August he was replaced as premier by former rebel leader Pushpa Kumar Dahal, at the head of a Maoist-UML-MJF coalition. Following Dahal's resignation in May 2009, Koirala, who remained Congress party president, was involved in negotiations for the formation of a new UML-led coalition. Despite his poor health and delegation of day-to-day party administration to a nephew, he remained active almost to the end, failing to prevent a dilution of the powers of the party leader, but also meeting frequently with the Maoist leader. Koirala and Dahal both became members of the "high-level political mechanism" formed last January to try to resolve the continuing crisis over constitutional and security issues: the interim constitution of 2007 was due to be replaced by a permanent constitution this May.

Koirala's wife, Sushma, predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter Sujata, who served as minister without portfolio in his cabinet in 2008 and is foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the current coalition government, and by his son Suresh.

• Girija Prasad Koirala, politician, born 20 February 1925; died 20 March 2010

Eminent violinist and orchestra leader

The distinguished violinist Max Salpeter, who has died aged 101, led such orchestras as the Philharmonia Orchestra, London Mozart Players, New London Orchestra, Boyd Neel Orchestra, Pro-Arte Orchestra and the recording orchestra the National Philharmonic. He played with the greatest conductors, including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, Guido Cantelli and Malcolm Sargent, and hundreds of soloists, among whom were pianists Artur Rubinstein and Sergei Rachmaninov, cellist Emanuel Feuermann, and violinists David Oistrakh and Jascha Heifetz, his great hero.

Born in Whitechapel, east London, Max was one of four brothers, whose parents had recently arrived from Kolomea, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Max would pick up two sticks and imitate a violin being played. His musicality was spotted by a cantor at the local synagogue and he started to have violin lessons at the age of nine. His career began at 14 when he began playing for silent films.

He became a member of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1933, playing in the first violins until 1939, when he joined the celebrated RAF Symphony Orchestra. In 1945, at the Potsdam Conference, he led a small ensemble that played to Churchill, Stalin and Truman. He was approached by Stalin with some personal musical requests – an honour, however dubious, about which Max was wryly amused.

In 1949 he was invited to co-lead the Philharmonia Orchestra by the orchestra's founder, Walter Legge. Two violinists shared the position: Max led when Furtwängler conducted, while Manoug Parikian led for Otto Klemperer.

On leaving the Philharmonia in 1956, Max formed the Prometheus Ensemble, comprising some of the finest musicians of the day, including viola player Herbert Downes, double bassist Adrian Beers, flautist Gareth Morris, oboist Léon Goossens, clarinettist Jack Brymer, horn player Alan Civil and harpist Osian Ellis. The Times commented: "The Prometheus Ensemble need fear no comparison with the Berlin and Vienna Ensembles … in technique and musicality it is their equal."

Max was a regular recitalist for the BBC Third Programme, making many appearances with partners Cyril Preedy, Clifton Halliwell and Peter Wallfisch, as well as a celebrated recording of the Brahms Horn trio with Dennis Brain and Preedy. He was also a member of several string quartets, including the Kutcher and Blech quartets. Later in his career, he performed as a freelance musician. Brahms and Beethoven were swapped for Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Dean Martin and even the Beatles. And there were TV shows with Tom Jones, Barbra Streisand and Morecambe and Wise: in the duo's famous episode with André Previn, Max was the only musician not to succumb to laughter.

On many of these working days, even into his 70s, he would fit in three sessions. It is said that in his entire working life he never missed a concert, rehearsal, recording or session. He retired from playing in 1986. He is survived by his wife, Mollie, whom he married in 1935, and two daughters.

• Max Salpeter, violinist, born 16 April 1908; died 1 January 2010