Faces to Watch in ’96 : The Year’s in Their Hands : Well, maybe not just theirs (notice we don’t list Jim Carrey). But these artists and entertainers--some you know, some you don’t--are most likely to make some kind of splash in ’96. Ready? Everybody into the pool. : DANCE : Pina Bausch

Imagine a huge stage covered with fresh carnations. Or dead leaves. Or giant cactuses. Or ankle-deep dirt. A stage where women are slammed, face-first, into glass partitions, are stalked by a giant crocodile--and always live in fear of their men.

German choreographer Pina Bausch energized a whole generation of European artists and audiences with these and similar visions, becoming a central figure in the new Expressionism.

Ever since Bausch, 55, opened the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival with a series of her uncompromisingly bitter feminist dance-dramas, her local admirers have longed for her return.

It’s still hush-hush, but negotiations are reportedly underway to bring her Wuppertal Tanztheater to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the fall in a newly commissioned work to be produced by UCLA, the Music Center and the Southern California Theatre Assn.