What does it mean to be present – with others, with a work of art, with oneself? This is a question that has preoccupied – and even obsessed – me for the better part of the last fifteen years. During those years, I have been exploring how to teach online, how to engage with theatre online, and how to live my own life online. All, I would suggest, are a kind of performance. They involve people coming together, in some sort of communal place, to create meaning through shared experience. But, as we all now know after several years of pandemic-affected life, what that shared experience looks and feels like can vary enormously. I need only gesture to the make-up of the 2022 International Shakespeare Conference (ISC), the occasion for which this article was originally written, to illustrate how differently we can be present with one another in a digitally connected, hybrid culture.