Shining Bright: Directing The Spotlight!

A passionate educator, Emma Tielus-Ward leads The Performer’s Studio Theatre Company with heart, imagination and – this month – a festive helping hand. Elizabeth Kerr reports

"So I was sitting at home, and that’s not good for a cat,” begins Emma Tielus-Ward of her partial exodus from Discovery Bay 10 years ago. Emma is hardly a traitor to the enclave she moved to in 2008 – she’s in DB every Wednesday, working with a semi-professional troupe of 30+ child actors. But she admits the change of address makes the rest of her life easier to navigate.

An actress and dancer, turned choreographer- director-producer, originally from south London, Emma has been leading performing arts workshops for Hong Kong youth for 30 years. Homebase is The Performer’s Studio Theatre Company (www.theperformersstudio.com) in DB, where she provides semi-professional training and theatre experiences. She hosts additional workshops in Hung Hom and Aberdeen, and runs The Arts Factory (www.theartsfactoryhk.com) in Sai Kung, offering classes in everything from hip-hop dance to musical theatre.

Emma is the picture of a performer: hair tight and high off her face, heavy-duty trainers for running around in, substantial duffle bag with which to tote around the accessories of the stage – including a bottle of water that’s spilt inside. She brushes it off. Why worry about a wet notebook?

Like so many transplants, Emma originally landed in Hong Kong after responding to an advert – placed by a small performing arts school. “If I’m honest, I was a little bit lost, but at the same time a little bit arrogant,” she says. “I’d just got my masters in drama [from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama]. I was supposedly a professionally trained actor. I was young, I was naïve, and I thought, what can I do?” She took the job, thinking she’d pay off some student debt and get some real work experience. Then headed home after her 16-month contract ended.

“I grew up very working class, where if you wanted something, you had to fight for it,” Emma explains. “When I arrived here, that was my mentality. I’d never been to Asia, so it was a real shock that people were gentle, and there was that safety element. The first six months I had a wall up, and I was quite ‘London’, but that slowly melted away. My mindset changed.” A self-described introvert, Emma points to herself as living proof that being loud and brash isn’t a prerequisite for being a performer, something she’s been doing since she was four (she had her first acting agent at age 11). “I was that kid,” she says with a laugh. “I was always going to be a performer. I was in every play at school. I was in the choir. I did drama, GCSE music, dance training, all of it.”

Her first industry job was in promotions for West End theatre before she bluffed her way into a choreographer’s gig at 18 with a youth theatre company. “I was awful. I was atrocious, but I did it.” She went on to appear on British TV (BBC and ITV), and onstage in London.

Emma began her second stint in Hong Kong in 1995 at a private art studio in Aberdeen that wanted to grow its performing arts business. She struck a bargain with the owner and agreed to work full-time for a year, then scale back to have time, a place and the freedom to teach drama. That job lasted four years, and taught her all about the demands of running a creative business. Eventually though, she thought, “Now what?” Enter The Performer’s Studio Theatre Company.

The stars aligned when Emma moved to DB the year Discovery College opened: the school gave her a spot on its Extra Curricular Activities semester programme, which was the start of something much bigger. Schools like Japanese International and Renaissance College followed DC in running her performing arts classes – yet something was missing. That’s when the penny dropped.

“I could see that my kids, my students, would get to a certain age, and then move on, and I was wondering why that was. And I wasn’t totally fulfilled on a personal level. I realised I wasn’t actually making enough theatre,” Emma recalls. “I’m a director and a producer – all of my classes, all of my workshops, have a performance at the end. That’s the bit that drives me. So I decided to set up The Performer’s Studio Theatre Company in DB. We did our first production in 2008 and, in 2016, we launched the Semi-Professional Children’s Team with our first large show. I tell the students [aged 7 to 16] that they’re semi-professionals and I treat them like professionals.”

Emma loves igniting creativity in the children she thinks of as her own; she’s child-free. She admits to being a bit obsessed with how we treat each other (poorly) and she’s intrigued by when we learn to do that. “I work with children because their instincts and their words and what comes out is not just innocent, it’s real.”

The glowing feedback from The Performer’s Studio Theatre Company’s first-ever show, The Witches, lit a fire under Emma and she just knew: “this is what we should be doing.” And as it turns out, she was right.

The DB troupe expanded quickly and now numbers 37, with an additional 40 waitlisted. As of 2023, there’s also the Theatre in Education Touring Company, whereby Emma sends her charges into local schools to stage plays for their peers. Each performance ends with a Q&A aimed at inspiring budding, young thespians. The company currently performs twice yearly, reaching 1,000 local school children.

“Our ethos is to get up onstage, it is important to share what we are learning, make mistakes, grow in confidence and then do it all again,” Emma says. “What we do is challenging; we work for the good of the show and we have no drama queens. We learn by falling off our bike and getting back on and trying again!”

Next up is Belfast-born composer Paul Boyd’s The Snow Queen, set for February 2 to 7, 2026 at the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre. “The Snow Queen is Hans Christian Andersen. It’s very enchanting; you know, snow on stage, lots of white. I think it’s just beautiful and mystical and the music’s amazing. Boyd’s music is just so jolly; we decided to have a Latin-dance choreographer. It’s super-exciting,” says Emma, who’s hoping to recreate the success of Madagascar from 2023, her first post-pandemic live show.

“We invited some kids onto the stage, and I filmed it. I had tears in my eyes. There were 250 kids and their teachers and no one was sitting down,” she recalls. “It was like a rave. It was like a party, but it was theatre.”