Spinning Stories

The first time Aidan Un '11 walked into a Second Sundae dance party, he knew he wanted to make a film about it. "Between the lights and the mirrors and the moving bodies, I just had this feeling like I had stumbled onto a treasure trove of images," he recalls.

Half diner, half night club, Silk City at Fifth and Spring Garden streets in Philadelphia has long been a magnet for enthusiastic crowds and eclectic musical events. In particular, Second Sundae, held on the second Sunday of every month since 2011 (with a hiatus during the pandemic), is beloved for its high-energy dance floor and its old-school dance and hip-hop soundtrack.

Un, an independent filmmaker entrenched in the Philly arts scene, spent more than a decade capturing the sights and sounds of the Second Sundae scene for his gorgeous and delightfully atypical documentary You Don't Have To Go Home, But… In it, he sets aside wide swaths of time to soak in the kinetic atmosphere. The shots are mostly handheld and visceral, full of waving arms, shuffling feet, and smiles lit up by disco ball flashes. The dancers spin and battle and get lost in the music.

Even outside the club, dance is never far from the minds of the film's major players. We see Jenesis, a dancer with formal training, in a studio taking a class. We walk down the street with neighborhood-famous Mach Phive as he wonders aloud what it would be like to dance on the checkered floor of a shuttered pizza shop. And we check in now and again with an older gentleman who goes by Shiny Dancer and prefers to put in his earbuds and groove on Spring Garden Street.

Un is especially fond of the off-the-cuff interviews shot outside the club at 2 a.m. when the dancers are sweaty and tired but beaming. "I think that's just the joy, whatever state of ecstasy folks have reached at the club that's making them talk," he says.

Un, who grew up in France with a Korean father and French mother, had never visited Haverford before starting school there in 2007. "I didn't know what a Quaker was," he says with a laugh. At Haverford, Un majored in philosophy, but it was a school project for an anthropology course that steered him toward his current path.

Former Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jesse Shipley offered his students a video alternative to the traditional final term paper. Intrigued, Un and a classmate went around interviewing students, professors, dining hall workers, and more about their various frustrations with life at the College.

"When I look back on it now, it seems a little crazy that people were willing to be so open, and to share so honestly," Un says, even if they knew the project would not be screened publicly.

"It was just really fun for me, discovering what filmmaking could be like," he says. "It was all extremely new, and the realm of possibilities was infinite—or at least as much as I knew how to do on Final Cut 7 at the time."

After college, Un made a short film about a Cambodian man who ran a French bakery in South Philly. "No one paid me to do it," he says. "I just had a small camera, and I wanted to see if I could make another film."
Encouraged, Un dove into the city's art world and started making short films on a shoestring budget for artists in the theater and dance scenes. Eventually, it became his full-time gig. He was working on a film for Mark Wong '05—artistic director of the Hip Hop Fundamentals dance company—when he was first turned on to Second Sundae. 

"I wanted to make a record of what it looked like, what it felt like, what it sounded like," Un says. "What clothes people were wearing. How they had their hair. What the club looked like. I just wanted to take that slice of time and to immortalize it."

The result, captured on film, has gotten a warm reception. Un screened You Don't Have To Go Home, But… at the Asian American Film Festival and BlackStar Film Festival, where he took home the Audience Award for Favorite Feature Documentary.

But for the filmmaker, the real prize has been the reaction he's gotten from his target audience. "Just to have dancers come up to me [after a screening] and tell me it touched them, that it reminded them of something, that they were happy to just see this documented," he says, "It just really meant everything to me."