John Darling was an original member of the People Show and a founder of John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, and had been Pilgrim’s former tutor at the Fine Art Deptartment, Leeds Polytechnic. Darling created unique sound collage tapes for each show, including purposely recorded sound effects, classical and contemporary music, and extracts from films and radio. The timing of these tapes became the script, to which the performance took place. Light was used to direct the performance from one image to another and to suggest different scenes and locations. Points of Departure (1977) was the performance that first introduced Hesitate and Demonstrate‘s particular style of creating many different individual images and locations in the one set. They discovered, by using tightly focused theatrical lighting, that they could transform the space, taking the audience on a journey by cross-fading tightly focused light from one image to another, such as a woman on a beach in a deck chair, to a women in a train carriage travelling across Russia. Hesitate and Demonstrates use of environments, objects, sound and light, grew to be highly complex and refined as their shows evolved. (Geraldine Pilgrim 2013)
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