Suzanne Sato

This is part of the special section, Experience as Research.

The Chicago Dance Mapping Project (CDMP) was conducted by Dance/USA over a period of eighteen months through 2002 "to capture a census of dance activity" in the six counties of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Although the research coincided with the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. needs assessments described in the winter 2004 (Vol. 15, No. 1) Reader, the Chicago research was even more broadly inclusive of diverse dance entities and was originally intended to be reported and used as a database.

"Without getting on a soapbox, I would say that dancing is as much a calling as it is anything else. Don't think of it as a career. You're stupid if you do. You've got to have something burning in your gut that you want to express."