It’s not easy to attract attention in the capital’s Vaclavske Namesti. Thousands of tourists pack the streets, almost as many cellphones ring and people in Mozart costumes foist concert tickets on you. It’s not easy unless you’re a gang of 10 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint missionaries, and you are in the midst of conducting a weekly “street display.” With clean-cut, clean-shaven faces, white shirts and ties — no matter the heat — and North Face backpacks, the Mormons look a bit like a very lost American high school debate team, except that they sing hymns and work the streets in fluent Czech.

And they take themselves far more seriously. “We see ourselves as ambassadors of God and our country,” one sister (or female missionary) says.

Their mission: to make “contacts,” who might then become “investigators” and receive instruction on church doctrine, and ultimately to “bring people to Jesus” by converting them to full-fledged membership in the LDS Church. There were more than 300,000 such conversions around the world last year, in no small part due to the efforts of over 60,000 missionaries, 77 of whom are stationed in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The term “missionary” evokes images from the past — Jesuits in South America or the London Missionary Society in Africa. Rarely do we think of 19-year-olds from Utah proselytizing in Prague across from Dunkin’ Donuts. But the mission is a rite of passage among young Mormons, or at least among young unmarried males deemed “worthy” by the church (i.e. observant of the church’s ban on alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and premarital sex). Men serve for two years and are eligible beginning at age 19.

Women’s missions begin later, at 21, and last only 18 months. While the mission is considered a duty for male LDS members, for women “the church would say you should not put off marriage just to go on a mission; you should only go if it really feels right,” explains Trisha Randall, a 23-year-old former missionary in the Czech Republic. Since so many Mormon women are married by the time they are 21, almost 80 percent of those who choose to serve are men.

But conversions seem like an unlikely consequence of the street display I observe. One man seems to mistake the missionaries for Disney World characters, handing his camera to his girlfriend and strolling over to have his picture taken. An elderly woman insists on teaching the missionaries a hymn or two of her own, which she sings for them and all of Prague. Another woman comes out of her apartment across the street to ask the singing elders how they like her new haircut.

The “flirt to convert” strategy is strictly forbidden by the church, and officially, male missionaries in the Czech Republic are allowed only to “contact” (or touch) other men, and women only to “contact” women. But it seems that exceptions are made for women of a certain age. I ask how missionaries choose their contacts.

“Most times you pray before you start, and one of the things you ask is that you’ll know whom to stop. But when I was feeling lazy I would just talk to old women and men,” says Randall. The street display ends when two drunken men start beating each other up in the flower bed behind the choir.

Even if only for the sake of public relations, talking to strangers is considered an integral part of a missionary’s work. But getting strangers to respond sometimes requires creative tactics. Randall usually begins with the typical queries: “Have you heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Do you believe in God?”

She quickly discovered that there are easier ways to break the ice in a country known for its ambivalence toward organized religion. So she would ask: “Can you tell me the singular form of ‘hranolky’ (french fries) in Czech?” Another pair of sisters developed a strategy that allowed them to use the language barrier to their advantage: First, sit down on the train next to a potential contact and begin reading the Book of Mormon. Second, find a word in Czech you don’t know. Third, ask the contact for a translation. “Five times out of 10 the missionary would end up giving away her Book of Mormon,” Randall says.

The decision to do missionary work isn’t made lightly. To start, missionaries have no input about which country or region of the world they are sent to. Nor do they enjoy the comforts that most American students studying abroad would consider basic necessities. The rules vary from mission to mission. But in the Czech Republic, alcohol, tobacco and caffeine are forbidden. So are phone calls home, except on Mother’s Day and Christmas, when they’re mandatory. No Internet and e-mail, no dating, music, movies, TV, radio, going to the gym or newspapers and magazines. Spiritual music and reading, however, are encouraged.

Around the world, missionaries get up at 6 a.m. for three hours of language and religious study, then head out to make contacts, teach investigators and perform community service until 9 p.m., when they are expected to be home. They are in bed by 10:30 p.m., in a room they typically share with their “companion,” a junior or senior missionary with whom they are required to work, live and travel 24/7. The missionaries in the Czech Republic receive only about $200 a month to support themselves, even though they (or, more likely, their parents) each pay about $375 a month into a common fund. The church then allocates money from the pot to missionaries around the world according to each country’s cost of living.

The Czech missionaries are, however, allowed to eat, so I head out to a cafeteria with them, where we feast on traditional dumplings. They banter about basketball rivalries (they do seem to know how Brigham Young University has done this season) and tease one another about getting “trunky,” which I learn is slang for homesick, as in “sitting on your trunk ready to go home.” Only the weak get trunky.

The reasoning behind the restrictions is partly doctrinal, partly pedagogical. It’s hard to be “Christ-like,” the missionaries explain, if you watch the Czech weather report delivered by a naked woman. But the restrictions are also designed to isolate the missionaries from worldly needs and obsessions, to sharpen their devotion to their task and to cultivate obedience and loyalty to the church.

“The whole point is bringing people to Christ,” Randall explains. “Anything that is a distraction is something to avoid. Too much thinking about home is a distraction. Too much thinking about current events or being beautiful is also a distraction.”

The practical effect of the missionaries’ unity in isolation is that, for two years, they live in a cultural twilight zone. They are fully part of neither American nor Czech society; they’re exposed to foreign cultures (many for the first time), and also strictly sheltered from those cultures. How, then, do the mostly American missionaries understand the Czech population they serve?

One thing doesn’t seem to have changed in the past few centuries. Historically, missionaries often gained the trust of their target communities by offering something they wanted or needed — medical supplies, education, consumer goods. While Prague missionaries don’t seem to consider themselves part of a “civilizing mission,” BRT — “Building Relationships in Trust” — is frequently accomplished by offering free English lessons. Missionaries say that offering to teach English is typically their last-ditch effort when going door to door. Officially missionaries don’t talk about religion during English lessons, which is considered a nonreligious service activity, but it is through these classes that a lot of people first get interested in the church.

“People get curious about why we’re teaching English, why we’re different from other people they meet,” Randall says. “Missionaries are very happy and upbeat.”

Of course, being American can also sometimes be a hindrance. “When NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, we got doors slammed in our faces,” recalls Elder Mattingly, a 20-year-old missionary from Salt Lake City.

There are other cultural obstacles: In a country where beer is often cheaper than water, the church’s prohibition on alcohol — not to mention caffeine and tobacco — makes Mormonism a particularly hard sell, as does the practice of tithing. (Mormons are expected to contribute 10 percent of their income to the church.) Randall notes that prevailing sexual mores are also a challenge.

“They lack basic morals,” she says of the Czechs. “Things like not sleeping with someone before marriage or being faithful after marriage are totally foreign concepts,” she claims.

I visit the Mission House in Prague on “transfer day,” when new missionaries arrive from the United States, others travel from one assignment to the next and those finishing their missions return to civilian life. The atmosphere is festive and insular, almost camplike, with hugging and gossip all around, and newbies standing on the sidelines overwhelmed and jet-lagged. We head out to Bohemian Bagel, the one place in Prague where you can get a New York-style bagel. Those going home seem disoriented, and their plans are vague — school, work, something. It’s tough, apparently, to stop being an ambassador of God.

“When missionaries first come home, they just glow. Gradually they have to come back to normal and it’s actually a painful process,” Randall recalls.

Many ultimately return to their mission countries under less demanding conditions, or use their language skills to pursue international careers. Randall now hopes to obtain a Ph.D. in Eastern European history. For others, the impact is less tangible, but no less significant.

“I think they come back older, wiser,” Randall says. “They’ve learned a lot about what it means to put someone else’s needs before their own. They make better husbands and students.”

Elder Mattingly tells me he’d like to publish some science fiction stories he has written, and asks me if I have any advice as a writer.

“Expect a lot of rejection,” I tell him.

“That’s OK, I’m used to rejection,” he replies, without missing a beat. And before saying goodbye he gives me some well-rehearsed advice of his own. “Have a good time here, but don’t drink the beer.”

It seems kids these days just don’t know how to throw a revolution. The only picket-worthy injustice at Georgetown University is a slow Internet connection, reported Dolly McMamus in the Washington Post last winter. And from the dejected slacking of “Reality Bites” to the 20-somethings in fabulous apartments dominating today’s primetime lineup, apathetic, apolitical and downright self-absorbed young people have become default pop-culture archetypes.

So when a movement protesting the use of sweatshops in the manufacturing of college apparel erupted on elite college campuses nationwide this spring, it’s no wonder the press was surprised. The New York Times called it the biggest wave of campus activism since the anti-apartheid rallies of the ’80s. Student agitators have been the subject of articles in Time, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, Business Week, the Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor and the Nation. Critics have decreed that it’s the ’60s but smarter. Harvard law student Aaron Bartley notes that today’s activists aren’t torn apart by the infighting that plagued their parents’ movements.

She is expecting to be struck, knowing that she deserves it and will allow it. Her
body is rigid, not with fear but with premonition and a kind of longing for whatever will happen to
her. Instead of rising to punish her, however, he tells her to take off her practice clothes.

If you had to make a guess as to the origins
of this little vignette, several Web sites protected by Adult Check and charging subscription fees
might come to mind. But the “she” in this story is a 13-year-old girl, and her “practice clothes”
are not a cheerleading outfit or any other staple of erotica, but a black leotard and pink tights.
The tale is drawn from “Collusion,” Evan Zimroth’s unsettling memoir about her childhood
relationship with her domineering ballet master.

Pointe shoes and tutus have a special place among our icons of femininity. Even my otherwise
feminist female friends who scorned fashion magazines, nail polish and “Melrose Place” would become
gooey with excitement when I brought mine out of retirement in college. Everyone wanted a turn to
try them on, and rise in awkward agony onto the tips of their toes, for just a moment to enact their
childhood fantasies. But rarely did such fantasies include domination by a Svengali-type teacher
with a Russian accent and a cane.

Ballet is inextricably bound up with fantasies of eternal girlhood. Dreams of being a dew-drop
fairy remain firmly planted in childhood, along with selling Thin Mints and wearing green polyester.
Yet aside from a few lessons in a local Dolly Dinkle studio, and a few performances in our parents’
living rooms, few of us actually enter ballet’s cloistered world of pristine glamour, grace and
femininity. The “adult” ballerinas we see onstage do little to dispel this connection between ballet
and girlhood. Flat-chested, skinny enough to make Ally McBeal seem pudgy and always adorned with
long hair, slicked into a bun and often topped with a tiara, many adult ballerinas look like the
10-year-olds we were when we gave the fantasy up.

Ballet, of course, can be sexy: What is a pas de deux other than an extended metaphor for sex?
But the sex depicted by ballet often more closely resembles pedophilia than mature sexuality. The ideal women, after all, are forever children.

But what happens when ballerina fantasies are not confined to girlhood, but usher a girl into
adolescence? Zimroth’s “Collusion” offers one answer. This isn’t simply another attempt to shatter
our cotton-candy illusions about the dance world (that’s been done before). Nor is it your typical
coming-of-age memoir of tortured adolescence. (Though there is plenty of torture.) Rather, she
describes how the deep convergence of scripted, exaggerated femininity with underlying pain that we
see performed onstage (the smiling, fluttering fairy whose feet are actually bleeding) infiltrated
the offstage psyche of at least one young girl:

When F first so unexpectedly hit me, he taught me more than to pay attention to the
small things, like battement tendu. He also showed me beyond words what it felt like to be a woman
with a woman’s submission and a woman’s power over a man. I see now that I did not in any ordinary
sense “grow up.” I was a child, and then one stunning moment later I was a woman. I moved beyond
childhood in the instant of discovering something I could not have possibly known before — that I could submit to the violence of love, recognize it as love, and be complicit in it.

Zimroth, a National Jewish Book Award winner and poet, writes of that time in a young dancer’s life when careers are made or broken. Subtitled “Memoir of a Young Girl and Her Ballet Master,” the book begins with a disturbing vignette. Zimroth, in her adult life, was raped by a boyfriend (her first sexual experience). But a few pages later she changes course. It wasn’t rape after all. “Did it hurt?” the boyfriend asked afterwards. “Yes,” she answered. “Do you want it again?” he persisted. “Yes,” she answered again. And apparently she remains convinced that she did want it, and that the experience was an allegory for her ballet training. If that’s not enough to get your attention: She’s not complaining. In fact, she considers the memoir an “elegy” to her ballet teacher, the man she refers to only as “F.”

Zimroth is on to something — sensational yet obvious. The training of a serious dancer involves ceding control, being touched whether you like it or not, being seen whether you like it or not. “Junk off,” our teachers would say, and that meant “strip, now.” We would remove the plastic shorts and ripped T-shirts and leg warmers that served more as a protective shield than a way of getting warm and be exposed. Down to regulation pink and black, unforgiving, and after age 13 unflattering for most. I’d play with the skin on my neck between combinations because there was nothing else to fidget with. The only saving grace was not being a student at the studio across town, where weights went up on a chart on the wall each week, and you didn’t perform the role if you didn’t fit in the costume.

It also meant wanting to be hurt. Misshapen and untalented dancers are simply ignored. So 13-year-old girls learn to take it as a compliment when the teacher, often male, grabs her leg and pushes it up to her ear, makes her repeat the combination until her muscles shake with exhaustion, pinches her arm so she remembers to hold it up, smacks the bottom of her heels so that they stay elevated. While we were corrected, we were to be passive, stare straight ahead and finish the combination, and allow our bodies to be “placed.” At the basis of it all — trust, devotion and passion, or so we were told. Sound familiar?

Zimroth is brave in telling this story — of how a value system that is stigmatized and labeled perverse in the outside world when enacted between two consenting adults is not only treated as normal but celebrated in the dance studio when the relationship occurs between a 13-year-old and a teacher who is three times her age. For Zimroth, there is a natural climax to the secret pact between teacher and student, the story that began this piece.

But this vignette, F’s order to strip naked and the deflowering that ensues, is actually the beginning of a three-page fantasy, events that would have taken place “if this were fiction.” The imaginary encounter in her teacher’s “secret” room is the closest we get to a physical consummation of her “collusion.”

Zimroth must resort to such fantasies, because her love affair is never really with F but with the ballet itself, and that’s where the difference between her love and those in S/M relationships begins. In fact, F does not exist for Zimroth outside of his power to make her a dancer: “It never occurred to me to endow him with a life outside the studio and his secret room — that is, a life away from me.”

It is ballet — not F himself — that transmits the values of domination and submission. She observes, “Ballet is a world in which ‘normal’ values are reversed: brutality is seen as a gift, fear as devotion, sadism as love.” Zimroth acknowledges that her story is not unique. And while she qualifies her claims in her introduction by pleading with her children to understand that she writes only of the hothouse world of ballet, “not a paradigm for living,” she simultaneously emphasizes that any female dancer “would immediately comprehend the nature of my relationship to F and could substitute her own F.” In the end, she endorses balletic B&D-S/M with the admission of her own complicity: “Children can collude. I colluded. I loved him.”

Those who defend S/M relationships outside the dance world do so by appealing to the value of sexual freedom: They argue that consensual expressions of sexuality should not be limited to vanilla heterosexuality. But a necessary precondition for such exploration is the existence of options — the option to submit or to dominate, the option to trade in an abusive or simply unhappy relationship for something better. In this context, the possibility for collusion exists (though whether or not it can exist for a 9- or 13-year-old is another issue entirely).

In the dance world as Zimroth describes it, the choices are to love according to the rules or not to love at all. In such circumstances one must question whether collusion is possible, if the idea of collusion is more than a rationalization for mistreatment.

Even Zimroth’s portrayal of her own consent falters sometimes. F at one point punishes her for taking up smoking by ritualistically and deliberately striking her three times with a cane. Fair enough, argues Zimroth. “Daring begets pain; that was the deal. It was worth it.” She relished that the ordeal was “private and forbidden, more secret and taboo than my childish attempt to smoke.” But when F unexpectedly and ferociously strikes her a fourth time on her way out the door she feels betrayed. “THAT was not part of the bargain, not part of the deal, not part of the reciprocity of elegance and pain we had so perfectly enacted. It was entirely unfair, uncalled for and very, very painful.”

In this one moment in the book, Zimroth acknowledges the blurry line between collusion and abuse, and her lack of power to negotiate that line. But without such power to negotiate, does a line separating collusion from abuse ever exist?

In the end, like a lover who mourns a lost relationship, Zimroth exults that she would “live her connection to F all over again,” and does not see her memoir as an attempt to “save some other little girl from a sadistic ballet master.” Unable to envision an alternative value system, she concludes from her experience that “perhaps the rigor and discipline, the self-mortification and rhapsodic ambition that I experienced are exactly what a girl needs to become a ‘great dancer,’ Perhaps F was right all along, and it was I who failed in my vocation and not F who betrayed me.” But she sells herself short. Rigor and discipline are possible without abuse and powerlessness, ambition is possible without self-mortification. There are other ways to love.

For most of us, the “femininity” that ballet exalts is hardly a model for anything, let alone our sex lives. Despite Zimroth’s commendable message that it’s OK for women to wear tutus or leather onstage (and in bed), we’d be wise to also think hard about the conditions and rules under which we choose these costumes (or, for that matter, choose them for our children). One thing is certain, after reading Zimroth’s memoir, watching the “Nutcracker” will never be the same.

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