The Citizen Arts International Festival announces performances of Reservoir by María José Contreras on September 17 and 18, 2026, at the Barnard Movement Lab at 6:30PM. For more information and to reserve free tickets, please visit https://www.citizenartsinternational.org/reservoir.

Reservoir asks audiences to sit with a question that feels urgent everywhere water is running out: what is water, if it’s not a resource.

Part lecture, part performance, Reservoir weaves scientific data and embodied testimony, asking what it means to inherit a crisis that is at once ecological, political, and deeply personal. Set against the water crisis of Santiago de Chile, the piece moves between the retreat of Andean glaciers and a legal architecture few outside Chile know exists: a water code, enacted under dictatorship, that made Chile the only country in the world where water is privatized.

Developed and performed by artist María José Contreras, the piece was created in collaboration with the interdisciplinary research project The Water Crisis of Santiago, supported by the Columbia Global – President’s Global Innovation Fund, and developed during the Artist in Residency Program at the Barnard Movement Lab.

María José Contreras is a multidisciplinary artist-scholar whose practice moves across documentary and experimental theatre, site-specific performance and urban intervention, with work presented throughout the Americas and Europe. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and one of seventy artists featured in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (Routledge, 2020) as a leading voice in contemporary performance. Her recent work includes Antigone Adrift, presented at the Centre Pompidou, and The Museum of Unlearning, featured at Vienna Art Week in 2025. She is the author of the forthcoming Viscous Performances: The Persistence of Creative Resistance in Neoliberal Chile (Duke University Press), a study that extends her long-standing inquiry into performance as a site of political and epistemological resistance.