The Magellan Project was written and co-directed by Rouse and Kyle Shepard at Brown Univeristy's Production Workshop in 2004. In this piece, explorer Ferdinand Magellan's failed circumnavigation of the globe served as a central metaphor used to examine the meaning of failure and the complexities of life's many journies. The story of The Magellan Project focused on six characters from different time periods who were each independently searching for the historical figure Ferdinand Magellan. Five characters spoke in English and one character spoke only in Spanish.

Using a cast of twelve performers, each of the six characters was portrayed by a team of two actors; one whose primary function was to speak and another whose primary function was to dance. Production Workshop's black box theater was transformed into a fantasy of a museum gallery filled with artifacts and ephemera both real and fake. Throughout the piece, the performers manipulated the modular set pieces to create arrangements representative of three different gallery spaces in a museum. With no audience seating, visitors to The Magellan Project were free to explore the gallery spaces and interact with the performers.

The structure of the piece included chance procedures, composed and improvised live music by jazz musician and Brown Student Ben Kamber and his combo, and choreographed and improvised movement created collaboratively by choreographer and Brown student Kyle Shepard, Rouse, and the cast. The text for The Magellan Project written by Rouse was based on free writing by herself and the cast and inspired by found texts as well.