Book excerpt: This book brings together new ideas about how communities, creative producers, and visitors can productively engage with competing notions of experience and authenticity in the tourist environment. It investigates how community interests intersect the desire for more intimate engagements with cultural experiences. Focusing on the way in which communities and visitors ‘perform’ new forms of cultural tourism, Performing Cultural Tourism is aimed at undergraduate students, researchers, academics, and a diverse range of professionals at both private and government levels that are seeking to develop policies and business plans that recognize and respond to new interests in contemporary tourism.