The brigade member is taking a lifetime of Mummers skills to the table.
Before he could even fit into a Mummers suit, Louie Castelli would twirl around South Philly Vikings members as they ran their New Year’s Day parade drills.
As a youngster, he’d study former South Philly Vikings leaders as they rearranged coins on kitchen tables, envisioning staging formations for the annual Fancy Brigade Finale.
Using karate moves, he’d even choreograph his own shows for family and friends.
Two decades later, the 26-year-old South Philly project manager and professional disc jockey is harnessing everything he’s learned about spectacle, performance and SPV and channeling the skills into his latest project — serving as captain of the institutional South Philly Vikings Fancy Brigade for the first time.
“Since I was a little guy, I’ve been involved in this… I’ve been in a suit as long as I could be,” he said.
From his mother choreographing the shows to his cousin holding captain status, Castelli says he inherited the Mummers “bug” even before he was born. Once he finally could fit into a suit, he gradually climbed the Vikings totem pole.
Along with marching each year as an active member, Castelli, a graduate of Saints John Neumann and Maria Goretti Catholic High School, was selected to serve on the club’s theme committee when he was just 16 years old. The promotion was later followed by his work on the club’s board, including working as secretary and then vice president over the last four years.
Bridging his spinning expertise with the fancy brigade, in 2011, Castelli — who DJs live mixes at private events and weddings across the area through his own Liberty One Entertainment — was asked to start producing the soundtrack for SPV’s annual four-and-a-half minute routines.
“He wanted to be here,” said 15-year captain Pete D’Amato. “He wanted to lead. He wanted to work hard. He cares. That’s important… everybody has a different lookout for this parade. Some people are just Mummers. Some people just want to dance. Some people, like Louie, want to be everything.”
Now as captain, Castelli is looking at this year’s show as a blank canvas, infusing the performance with his own creative flairs.
For Castelli, this year’s theme, “The Galactic Circus: Coming to a Planet Near You,” especially allows him to tap into his imagination, including producing a music mix fused with nuances of outer space and trapeze acts.
“When you’re a captain, with your theme, you kind of gotta adapt to every show. Every show calls for a different performance from you,” he said. “…This is something that’s been on our table for years now. It’s been out, and it’s been presented over and over. Just up until now, it was missing something, and it just felt like the right year the to do something high-energy. It’s a very ‘Viking’ theme. It’s different. It’s out of the ordinary. It’s a Vikings show.”
Aside from the music, Castelli says the majority of the elements featured in Vikings shows are produced in-house, including videography content which streams on colossal screens working as backdrops.
Seeking an inventiveness that would combine constellations with clowns, Castelli and his team have been brainstorming visuals for costumes, choreography, videography and sets all year.
“What fit well for Louie was the visuals, which we like to go by,” D’Amato said. “We like the ‘wow’ factors, and the things that people are going to see, the gimmicks, stuff like that. This theme had a lot of it, and we had two or three themes on the table, but what drove this one was a lot of visuals that we like, and Louie loved the couple of the parts that are in here. It’s coming out nice. It’s coming out just the way I think he planned it.”
While the 33-year-old South Philly Vikings have 13 first-place prizes under their belts, some of the most impressive statistics in the Philadelphia Mummers Fancy Brigade Association, and are striving to clinch a 14th, Castelli hopes to pass along to his team of nearly 80 members a lesson instilled by his own predecessors.
“As much as winning is the goal, the eye-on-the-prize, at the end of the day, I just want everyone to be proud of what they did out there,” he said. “That’s all you could ask for. I want everybody to be proud of that show they put on, and walk away from it — win, lose or draw, knowing that we put it all out on the floor, and we gave it everything we got, and we came and did what we were supposed to do.”
