"music fills you with a thrill you just can't express..." - Hobart Smith 

The Thrill is an interdisciplinary live project engaging movement and music inspired by archival recordings of Appalachian musician, singer, and dancer Hobart Smith. In The Thrill, banjoist Allison de Groot (she/her) and percussive dancer Nic Gareiss (he/they) sound and move together, meshing steps, instrumental melodies, songs, and improvisations simultaneously in discussion with, in tribute to, and in a queer lover's tiff with Smith's music. The visual album version of The Thrill made NPR's Best Roots Music of 2022 and fifty percent of the project's Bandcamp sales benefit Lonesome Pine Mutual Aid, a Black, Indigenous, queer-, and women-led organization which distributes flood relief including food, drinking water, and other community care across southwest Virginia where Hobart Smith lived and learned his music. The duo will perform the pieces live followed by a post-show discussion moderated by fiddler and ethnomusicologist Dr. Tes Slominski.

This event is presented by the Queer Souths Initiative, which seeks to bring queer artists and performers working in the South into conversation with scholars, staff, and students at the University of Virginia. The initiative seeks to celebrate aesthetic and critical practices that challenge normative structures, intimacies, and ways of knowing. Queer Souths explores this work across Appalachia, the Southern United States, and the multiple transgeographic and transglobal Souths, connecting diasporic and migrant networks from Virginia to Philadelphia to El Paso to Cape Town.