by Molly Van Der Molen, photos by Kevin Russell Poole
Declan Zhang and I shared breakfast over Zoom for our grand return to the Rap Sheet! They eagerly awaited the arrival of their breakfast in their sunny plant-filled Brooklyn apartment, donning a bandana that perfectly jives with their love, dare I say infatuation, for their favorite reality TV show. Declan’s confidence soars as does their talent in everything they do. And their intellect and quick wit is charming as ever! The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MOLLY VAN DER MOLEN: Hi Declan! Thank you for being here!
DECLAN ZHANG: Thank you for having me!
MOLLY: So, I'm just gonna dive on in. How do you identify as an artist?
DECLAN: What I’ve usually been telling people is that I am a percussionist. I am a trained percussionist, that is what's on paper, that is what I’m trained to do, and it's something I do very well and I take a lot of pride in it. And I am also a playwright, and then I’m an actor, I’m a producer. I hate the whole multi-hyphenate, or I don’t hate it. I think it's the most natural way of being an artist. Especially living in New York. But equally important to all, I am a gardener and an amateur chef and those feel 100% equally artistic in practice. [Editor note: Since this interview, Declan has started cheffing professionally at Dinner Party in Fort Greene.]
MOLLY: That is so true, is that something that has come up recently for you? I feel like a lot of people have found pandemic hobbies.
DECLAN: Oh, it's definitely a pandemic thing. It's also like I was such a career person before the pandemic. It was the most important thing to me and i was pretty much willing to sacrifice anything else in my life if it meant I was advancing my career, whatever that meant, and now I feel very—I mean it's still important to me, it definitely is but—
MOLLY: —it takes on a new meaning.
DECLAN: Yeah, it means different things to me now. And also, I’ve accepted that a lot of things about my life, and the life of most people in the world, will get harder every single year that I’m alive and I feel like I’ve started taking steps to deal with that now. I feel like I'm really beginning to just start to understand that growing food and knowing how to care for plants and how to prepare food in beautiful ways for people is the beginning of disaster preparedness for me. I think that sometimes, artists tend to overvalue their importance. Not, like, the importance of being an artist, but the importance of their specific art or their specific artistic practice. I do believe that art has a very critical role and I think it's the Toni Cade Bambara quote about making "revolution irresistible" or something like that, and that absolutely is, for me, the reason why artists and art-making are critical in building a better world. I also think that artists should be grounded in other parts of contributing to the world because I think you can get insular and disconnected from it if you aren’t. “Artist” should not just mean sitting in your room doing this. If you call yourself an artist, you should also be a carpenter. You should also be a gardener. You should be a plumber. You should be a nurse. I don’t know how you make art without—
MOLLY: —exploring other things in the world?
DECLAN: —exploring non-explicitly artistic things.
MOLLY: Do you feel like you implemented some of the same tools that you use for your percussion and your playwriting in your gardening and cooking? Do you feel like you’re satisfying your artistic cravings in new ways?
DECLAN: I went to the music school at NYU and music school has so many problems. I learned so many bad lessons about art making and music school treats music as an athletic thing and not as a creative discipline and that entire framework is just wrong. But, there are valuable things I gained from that and one of the very valuable things I gained—it's actually something that’s very important for musicians to be able to do and understand—is the value of sitting down and very deliberately practicing and paying attention to technical skill. Actors don’t totally understand what that means because when you go to acting school you already know how to speak English, you already know how to walk around a room, you already know how to, like, construct a sentence. When you first learn an instrument, you have to learn the alphabet on your instrument. You have to learn to string a sentence together to communicate.
So, there's a lot of technical skill that you have to do. I went into music school pretty behind a lot of my peers. I didn’t start doing music until, like, 10th grade, so I didn't have years of familiarity in my bones of musicianship that a lot of people did. I had to spend a lot of hours in practice rooms doing basics, doing exercises and building muscle coordination that I didn't have and that was really hard for me. I don’t get any artistic zhuzh out of individual solo work. Everything that I love about art making in theatre is collaboration, and being in rooms with people, and breathing together. I learned a lot and gained a lot of really valuable lessons from taking a step back. This is part of being an artist too: being alone, concentrating on your physical skills and really working on those and improving those. It is actually separate from a creative process, but it's very, very important and I definitely feel that it is one of the positive things I took from music school.
I moved into an apartment right before the pandemic that has this beautiful backyard and I hadn’t done gardening or plant parenting before that and I definitely brought a lot of those lessons from music school, just in terms of, like, ‘sit down, take your time and learn how to do something correctly, and do it again and again and again, and make a mistake, and do it again and again and again until you do it right.” That style of learning and absorbing information and repetition is something that I had to do for myself. I took that sense of discipline to gardening. And I think it's doing quite well out there. I’ve got a tomato plant that is huge and finally beginning to produce tomatoes, two cucumber plants, tons of morning glories, a small lemon tree that is producing its first lemon. I’ve got a kale plant that is inside. Yeah! Pride and joy for sure! The cooking thing I’ve been doing for a long time. I mean, I got a lot better in quarantine but I was already pretty good.
And I can say all the “plant gay” things like: its so centering, it can give you a sense of time, it's something to take care of which means you also take care of yourself, but I also very genuinely think that like in the next 30-40 years, dude, we better all know how to grow some tomatoes.
MOLLY: (laughs) What is something else that you’re interested in learning about that you haven’t even attempted yet?
DECLAN: Um, like wilderness stuff.
MOLLY: Like survival?
DECLAN: Survival stuff. Another big quarantine thing for me was getting into Survivor and now Survivor is like 60% of my personality. I fucking love Survivor. It's the most incredible sport.
MOLLY: It's starting soon, isn’t it? a new season is starting soon?
DECLAN: Yeah on Wednesday, September 22nd. I will be watching that. I will be on the show, I will be applying every single year until they cast me, I will get cast on the show, I will play, I will win, I am like so, so, so nerdy about this thing.
MOLLY: I believe in you!
DECLAN: And now, I’m planning a camping trip with my dad for him to teach me wilderness things and stuff like that - Oh! I think my breakfast is here, I’ll be back in 1 minute!
MOLLY: Take your time, I'm gonna pour myself a cup of coffee.
(A few minutes later)
DECLAN: Oh my god, I’ve been so doom and gloom apocalypse and now I have my coffee and I’m like, “everything's fine actually.”
MOLLY: That looks delicious!
DECLAN: I ordered huevos rancheros, but it came in burrito form, which is interesting.
MOLLY: Oh, hm...
DECLAN: Which is fine, but it's so, oh my god, I’m so sorry I have to get my hot sauce, I’ll be right back.
(A moment later)
DECLAN: ALRIGHT! Hit me!
MOLLY: What kind of theatre excites you?
DECLAN: I’m always super compelled by storyteller theatre. Most of Shakespeare's plays are storyteller theatre, Hadestown is a storyteller piece where, like, the actors are playing actors playing characters and part of the show is like, “we’re doing a show and I’m playing this person.” I just love that. I don’t know what it is about it, but I love it.
MOLLY: Well, you as the audience are part of the show too.
DECLAN: Yes! Yes definitely that. I also just love storytelling. It is kind of like the essential narrative art form, right? I’m always captivated by theatre that does that. That’s really kind of a basic answer ...
MOLLY: No, that’s a good answer! What's your favorite theatre experience that you’ve been a part of?
DECLAN: Right before the pandemic I produced my own play called Hyacinth and Apollo. That was my first play that I ever produced in a real production. It was at Dixon Place; it was just one night. I was the playwright and also the producer and I also helped direct it. It went really really well, we packed the house, and I was so, so proud of it. I got a wonderful cast together, I really felt like I did a good job as a producer, all the cast members had such wonderful things to say to me afterwards and sent me such nice notes being like, "this was such a good process and I was really so proud of what I was able to do" and "thank you for bringing us together to do this", and that’s like the best fucking thing to hear from collaborators! And yeah, I am never going to forget what that felt like when the lights went down and the show started and there were like 100 people - there were 100 people in the room and all of them believed in me!
MOLLY: (Laughs)
DECLAN: That was a really positive experience. And I think ultimately I belong in producer roles. That is where I probably work best and am best at facilitating great art-making. Yeah! That was great! My own play! Self-produced! Shoestring budget! But I pulled it together and it was just a really great experience with a lot of people I loved! Of course I worked at New York Theatre Workshop right before and during part of the pandemic.
MOLLY: What were you doing there?
DECLAN: I wasn’t in an artistic role, I was the executive fellow.
MOLLY: Nice, for the 2050 fellowship?
DECLAN: Yeah, so I was tangentially working on whatever productions they were doing that season.
MOLLY: That’s so cool!
DECLAN: It was, really. The bird's eye view of everything was super valuable in its own way. A lot of things I learned about fundraising and producing, at a very big level at the workshop, I took directly to how I produced Hyacinth and Apollo and those strategies absolutely transferred down to the $2000 budget that I put together for it. I loved working at NYTW. It was the right place for me. And personality-wise, I completely fit in there.
MOLLY: I’m going to ask you one last question. You’ve said so many great things! My last question: What is your secret or not-so-secret obsession? Like artistic or anything!
DECLAN: Hah! Nobody knows that I love Survivor! That's not true, everybody knows. If I like something, people have to beg me to shut up about it.
MOLLY: That's a good quality to have.
DECLAN: (laughs) well….
MOLLY: I think it is!
DECLAN: Survivor! That’s really the only answer I can give. I think it's the ultimate super-sport of physical human prowess, of human survival skills, of human social dynamics, and clawing your way to the top. It's all these little interactions and these little looks and these little asides where you’re working your way into something and you’re working someone else out of something. There's the high level strategic chess board aspect to it that’s not just the reality TV social dynamics. I mean I could just go on and on and on. Of anything America has put out in hundreds of years of cultural products, I think the good things we got are reality TV and musical theatre. And Survivor being like a real banner point of the reality TV side of things. I also, because I’ll be in it someday, think everyone needs to start familiarizing themselves with it now, so when I’m on it and have my unbelievable game-defining win, they’ll understand everything that I’m doing.
MOLLY: Do you think that you’ll ever do like a Survivor play or a project that’s like -
DECLAN: I’ve got like...things.
MOLLY: Brewing already?
DECLAN: Here’s the thing! Survivor is also incredibly theatrical!
MOLLY: Of course, it's on TV.
DECLAN: Are you familiar?
MOLLY: I haven’t seen it recently, but my parents were really into it when I was little, so I've definitely viewed it.
DECLAN: Definitely. Well, in modern seasons, players have started to understand the performance of being on TV because you have to win the votes of the other players at the end to actually win. So people have started to understand that when they're at the tribal council, it's literally a stage and there's this very interesting, like someone should write a performance studies paper on the dynamic between the players and Jeff and like the audience. The audience that is the other players and the audience that is the TV audience, because there is something REALLY interesting from a theatre standpoint on what is happening there and I could go on and on and on ...
MOLLY: I think this falls into your interest in storytelling theatre too!
DECLAN: Exactly!
MOLLY: Because the audience is very involved in the nature of it being a competition and having something to root for. But also having the host of the show there makes it a direct address to the audience. And the audience becomes just as invested in it as the competitor.
DECLAN: And well, the really interesting thing is that now, everyone who goes on it will see the narrative lines being written into the show as it's happening to them. So, you’ll see people say in their confessionals, like, “I know this guy's gonna be a fan favorite, he's clearly an underdog, he's clearly this guy that everyone's gonna love, we have to get him out of there because everyone loves him.” So, you’ll see people fighting their own narratives and getting narratives imposed upon them and they’re running with that and they're people who aren’t actors. It's just fascinating!
MOLLY: Well that’s awesome! September 22! What time is it gonna be?
DECLAN: 7PM! I’m gonna double check… oh, we don’t know what time yet, okay, probably at 7PM! [Editor note: It has been announced that the two-hour season premiere of Season 41 of Survivor starts at 8PM on Wednesday, September 22]. Anyway, thanks for letting me talk about that!
MOLLY: Thanks for plugging Survivor! It's really underground, not a lot of people know about it.
DECLAN: I’m gonna roll my eyes so hard when I read this interview.
MOLLY: Every other line is going to be, “ I love Survivor!"
DECLAN: (laughs)
MOLLY: Thank you so much, Declan. I hope you have a great rest of your day!
DECLAN: Thank YOU!
MOLLY: This has been a great chat and I’m so glad I got to learn so much about you!