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T he community of Parara Puru in Chagres National Park, Panama, a two hour drive from Panama City, is an Emberá community with many talented and skilled dancers. The members of this community–women, men and children–dance for consecutive groups of tourists day after day. They dance traditional Emberá dances, some ofwhich were used in the past in curing ceremonies, while others were used purely for entertainment. Due to their full-time involvement with tourism, the residents of Parara Puru have numerous opportunities to perfect their skills as individual performers and to spontaneously improvise or explore the details ofdance as an expressive medium. Their daily engagement with Emberá dancing, and the enactment of dances in front of audiences of outsiders, has encouraged local dancers to develop a strong interest in the authenticity and history of their dance, the details of the choreography, and its importance as medium of representation. Overall, the practice of dancing for tourists has emerged as an act of wider significance for the Emberá, contributing not only to the global visibility of this ethnic group, but also to the knowledge and awareness of local dancers about their own culture. This chapter embarks upon an exploration of Emberá dance, which has three aims. First, I seek to chart ethnographically the details of this tradition, which had been in decline over the later part of the twentieth century, but has–since the introduction of tourism fifteen years ago–been revitalized. Given that previous ethnographic testimonies on this topic–however valuable these may be–are short and do not provide a thorough description of the …