The Doodle Project
It started with doodles in a high school notebook — Rob's. Stan saw them, recognized something worth pursuing, and built a project around the idea for his college art students. Years later Rob adapted it for his own students — dancers discovering what it means to get lost in play in an unfamiliar medium, then carrying that freedom back into their bodies. What began as marks on a page became a three-phase practice — and a creative conversation that passed between father and son across decades. And then the conversation found new forms.
It began with Rob's High School Doodles
Stan's Doodle Project — Six examples from Stan's college students — the project in practice.
First Instruction
Create a line gesture as a foreground on the page. Taper the gesture so it is thinner and thicker. Then fill it in.
Second Instruction
Using ONE doodle shape, fill in the whole page in and around the foreground shape.
Another Example
Another Example
Another Example
Another Example
Rob's 3-Phase Doodle Project
Dancers approaching choreography typically work to solve a specific problem — slowly, carefully, editing as they go. That process has its own value. But what it can crowd out is free-flowing experimentation and play. The Doodle Project creates a different kind of space — one where there is no problem to solve, no right answer, and no erasing. Just the conversation between you and what you're making.
The goal is to create without pre-thinking, without erasing mistakes — turning them into new directions. A conversation between you and your creation. Each phase builds on the last, developing improvisational and compositional skills in a solo medium. Together they embody the essence of the creative process.
Phase One (Option A)
Write your name in cursive across the whole page — or choose another word with personal meaning. One word, written large, across the entire page. Then begin changing and enhancing the shape: double the lines, make them taper in or flare out, color them, create areas of positive and negative space. Let the letters become something more than letters.
Next, choose a single doodle shape and let it unfold as a background — behind and around the foreground, throughout the whole page. Most people don't stick to one doodle shape, and that's fine. That's the conversation taking over.
Phase One (Option B)
Pick up a pen. Start drawing. No plan, no judgment, no erasing. Let the line go where it wants and follow where it leads. Mistakes become new directions. A design conversation between you and the page.
Phase Two — Collage or Sculptural Variation
Take what you made and what you learned from making it. Your starting point is both the object from Phase One and the experience of creating it — the flow you found, or the thinking that got in the way.
Collect materials, let things incubate, and wait for the ah-ha moment. Then begin. Some possibilities: scan and enlarge images from Phase One to use as ingredients in a collage, add other materials, or take it in a sculptural direction entirely. Let Phase One speak to you and respond.
Phase Three — Into the Body
After two phases in unfamiliar territory — pen, paper, collage, sculpture — the work returns home. Phase Three is a performative variation on everything that came before: the objects you made and the experience of making them.
Look back at your whole process. Sense what the different stages look like and feel like in your body — texture, rhythm, shape, sensation. This is not a verbal process. It's intuitive and sensory. Let your body respond.
Then move. Experiment. Pull from your earlier processes and allow yourself to go to new places. Video yourself — some of what emerges will be subtle, and you'll want to be able to look back.
This is not about creating a finished dance. It's about discovering new ways of generating movement — following the same impulse that started with a pen and a blank page.
Rob's Students' Work
In Their Own Words
Dance Graduate Student—Doodle Project:
"When I first began as a student of choreography, I struggled with letting go of judgment and thought. I have always been very analytical, and until this point I approached choreography in the same way; rather than letting movement and creativity happen naturally, I thought about the movement, thought more, judged what I had just created, and ended up stifling myself. I didn’t consider myself to be an intuitive person, and I was unable to create in such a manner. The doodling project was the first inkling I had that perhaps I was intuitive after all. I had always doodled, and engaging with this project allowed me to fully appreciate the mind’s ability to create without conscious thought. As I added more and more to my doodle, I began to realize that I did have the ability to suspend judgment and create in the moment. Since that time, my choreographic process has become an unfolding of ideas that occur to me naturally and subconsciously. I try to allow my movement to be the drawings of my doodle, letting them appear in the studio and exist without judgment so that my creative flow does not stop or become stifled. The doodling project was the catalyst for my shift from judgment to intuition."
Engineering Undergraduate Student—Living Musically:
"I haven’t seen such genuine engagement and joy out of a group since Kindergarten. I believe this element of play exists within all of us from when we are young, but we tend to lose it overtime. I love how much this class is teaching us new paradigms of thought, even though it’s also like a reminder of what we’ve lost. As we move on from here I’m very anxious to see how far we can take it and I hope that we’ll be able to apply the lessons here for the rest of our lives. I know I plan to."
Living Musically grew out of the Doodle Project and Rob's work with dancers — a philosophy that used improvisation in music as a model for living. It first took shape as a course co-taught with Dr. Mark Montesano in the Honors College at Arizona State University — Living Musically: Philosophy and Practice of Improvisation — and became the foundation of his Creative Practice courses in the Dance program, where the focus shifted from philosophy to practice. The ideas that ran through it — attention, play, communication beyond words — are the same ones that ran through Stan's work for six decades.