Joy of Dance Experience (JODE)

Solvej Amelia Noa is an impromptu, improvisational, multi-genre performance artist, as well as an educator, Embodiment Coach and non-denominational minister, based in Seattle WA. Amelia’s dance background and formal training are primarily in ballet, modern, jazz, musical theater, hip hop and afro-brazilian dance styles. She danced for numerous Seattle based contemporary dance companies from 1995-2002. At the end of that time, Amelia had incurred multiple dance related injuries, and related complications, and it was then she began what would become a dedicated rehabilitation and rejuvenation practice. This was the seed planted that lead to Amelia creating the Joy of Dance Experience (J.O.D.E.) in 2018: a sustainable, holistic self care sequence, structured to identify and tend the needs of the body, prioritizing safety, joy and freedom. Amelia credits JODE with restoring her to mobility, agility, resilience and vast quantities of JOY. With an essential upgrade in attitude, approach and awareness, Amelia returned to performing contemporary and improvised dance in 2016. She currently collaborates with choreographers from various locations across the country.

Amelia’s improvisational movement work erupted around 2003, when she joined the freestyle cyphers (circles) in local Seattle dance clubs, and began dancing to house music. With break dancers, waackers, voguers, pop-lockers and more as her sources for inspiration, her movement repertoire burst far beyond what had been her previously perceived bounds. She quickly developed an interested in supporting others in the same exhilarating, fulfilling discovery of their own bountiful resources for fresh movements and ideas. This resulted in her teaching house dance in various studios around Seattle, with the most recent location being Cornish College of the Arts, in the college dance department.

About a decade later, around 2013, Amelia discovered a treasure of a music venue in Seattle called the Spite House. This beautiful underground living room music venue revealed Amelia to the impromptu, improvised music aspect of her artistry, and she became a regular contributor, and ultimately, a curator at the Spite House. It was in that space that her freestyle movement vocabulary began to be translated and expressed as improvised and intuited sounds and poetry, with the use of a loop pedal, in concert with organic movement. This laid the groundwork for Amelia’s ministry, Our Love of Life Opera (OLOLO). Through OLOLO, she explores, cultivates and disseminates the potent medicine availed of the arts, which she considers the primary mediums through which inspiration is expressed and healing is experienced.

Amelia is also the founder of M.A.N.G.O. Family Wellness; a trauma-informed source for Embodiment Coaching for children and adults, as well as parent and family coaching for families in mild to extraordinary distress. Through MANGO, Amelia also provides trauma-informed anti-bias training, as well as infant mental health workshops for educators and care-givers. Amelia identifies as FREE and dedicates her life to a Higher Power.