Dola's Victorian 'Running In Place' Video Pops With Smartphone Choreography

If you've seen actress/performer Condola Rashad as high-powered attorney Kate Sacker on Billions, you know the way she can work the room in a suit. Yet under the musical moniker of Dola, she's set up a vast blank canvas onto which she can paint any sort of cosmic vision she likes. As she tells MTV News, her dynamic new visual for "Running in Place," which premieres today (May 22), "brought me to a very Victorian place."


That's only segment of the story. "Running in Place" is the third release from her EP Space Daughter, which she calls her "playful ode to the divine feminine." As such, each visual for now has had its own distinct vibe and aura. "Running in Place" is, in Dola's words, "a moody song about the death of mystery brought about by the taking over of dating apps." And the vision, which she co-directed, brings that specific tragedy to life.





For each of Space Daughter's visual treatments, Dola herself appears because the titular being, ushering in a different side of herself and the journey. "The idea is that at the best of each video, she does something that basically permits her to manifest into another version of herself, to tell a different story of herself. Her story," Dola mentioned. By the end of the violet-tinged "Running in Place" video, a black-clad mourning Dola even lies down ferns at a headstone that reads "R.I.P. Mystery." "I like Whenever I meet somebody, not knowing everything about them. And there's something about the dating apps where you do the full background check before you even meet the person."


This wasn't quite her idea from the jump; case in point, it took a little bit of distance to discover, which she did while listening back to the Space Daughter songs she created with collaborators.


"All of 2019 was manifestation year for me. I drew up these mood boards. I drew up these treatments and these outlines for these videos last January. And then we filmed these in August," she mentioned of the ambitious Space Daughter project. Knew whenever she noticed the song's bridge — anchored around the lyrics "swipe to the left then we swipe to the correct — that one of the video's central images could be based around a smartphone. "I knew I wanted choreography with the cell phone. I knew that. I was like, 'You have to be dancing with this cell phone! I know that.'"


That dancing comes by way of the Dola and flanked support all seated in corsets in a Victorian interior, the set design matching the song's baroque strings. Although the phones in their hands are purposeful anachronisms. "I fancied that juxtaposition between something that was antique and modern," she mentioned. "I knew I wanted that in the same image, of the constriction of what it is that I feel some days with dating apps."


She's also felt walled in about her sound as an artist, which doesn't routinely follow along straight lines. She views the musical and visual components of "Running in Place," as an example, as "a cute mix of Stevie Wonder and Tim Burton." Although her previous Space Daughter entries — the gentle, elemental "Blue" and the sensual, bombastic "Give Up the Gold" — couldn't be more different from that vibe (and from each other).


"What excites me is, as you can visualize from 'Give Up the Gold' or 'Running in Place,' [is how] I think folks are all going to be, 'Wait, what? Where are we going right now she said.


Dola still has a couple of new shades of herself to reveal as she rolls out the rest of Space Daughter. Yet what's consistent, even if the music itself varies from track to track, is the inspiration. "To me, I just felt like, even as an actor, my work is inspired by music. Each and every character I've played has had a playlist that habitually builds from musical pieces," she mentioned. "So it's truly shaped the way that I walked through my life."


To that end, Dola is donating 100 percent of her personalized proceeds of "Running in Place" throughout June, July, and August to benefit VH1's Save the Music Foundation — which will aid in music education at a unprecedented time because of the coronavirus pandemic. "As schools are moving towards remote learning, these music students and teachers have sort of lost the ability to express themselves at school in person, along with a lot of those students have limited technology at residence she mentioned. "So I appreciated doing what they can to prepare ensure that the students continue to learn about making music in these limited ways."


Visualize that inspiration in action by checking out Dola's "Running in Place" video as soon as it drops later today.