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I first encountered the term ‘both-and’ in Nelson’s book Practice as Research (2013). Brushing up on my English grammar, it seems clear that ‘both … and’ is simply a correlative conjunction describing how two words relate to one another. It is neither a theoretical nor a philosophical concept. Moreover, ‘both … and’ is not used with a hyphen and, as merely a grammatical construct, is clearly undeserving of being placed in inverted commas. It would seem to me that ‘both-and’ rather points also to something more (as opposed to its counterpart ‘either-or’). Indeed, ‘both’ serves as a metaphor for the idea of multiplicity, ‘the coexistence of the One and the Many’ (Cull 2014: 22). Therefore, when I employ Nelson’s ‘both-and’ concept I mean ‘both … and … and also’ or ‘both … and … and … [etc.] … and also’. Obviously ‘both-and’ is more convenient.
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Because of my personal experiences as a performing artist, it feels necessary to expand Nelson’s ‘constellation of interconnected praxical spheres’ (2013: 23) to also include the highly intertwined spheres of life and work. Although these spheres may feel overly simplistic at first glance, the complexity of dynamics at play between them quickly becomes apparent. For instance, while simultaneously rebalancing my professional artistic and creative work to include (in addition to performing) more teaching and directing/choreographing, I have also become more active as an artist-researcher. In this way, work expands into (at least) four praxical spheres of ‘performing’, ‘directing/choreographing’, ‘researching’, and ‘teaching’ (which can also be subdivided into ‘artistic teaching’ and ‘academic teaching’).
In the life sphere I aspire to live more healthfully and with deeper connections to my local community. In this way, I can say that my sphere of life encompasses the interconnected spheres of ‘diet’, ‘physical fitness’, and ‘mental well-being’. Whereas many people choose to keep their work and life spheres separate, mine are increasingly overlapping. This is partly because of simple time management and efficiency but, more meaningfully, also because the basis of my research into integrative performing practices suggests that integrative performing is inseparable from integrative living (Skelton 2019).
To give an example, my ‘physical fitness’ sphere includes a strict routine, four to six days a week, of high-intensity strength training (30 minutes), stretching (30 minutes), and cardiovascular exercise (60+ minutes). While these activities certainly attend to my fitness and well-being goals in daily life, they are simultaneously necessary to maintain a physique and condition necessary for my career that can involve extensive physical labour and the critique of my body on stage. However, is my strict strength training regime addressing the need to maintain a high level of core support for my professional work (e.g. to prevent injury and to simultaneously sing and dance), or my life-long vanity project of having defined abdominal muscles? I would say that it is ‘both-and’. The overlapping activities of improving daily well-being and deepening my artistic practice support and sometimes even mutually constitute one another.
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