Dance : Jump. Fall. Bounce. Bravo. : With scaffolds, cables, platforms and trampolines, ‘pop action’ artist Elizabeth Streb sends her Ringside dancers twirling, dangling and crashing--all to make a point.

S woosh. Oooooomphf! Ahhhhhh . . .

Four performers dangle headfirst, in front and near the top of a 40-foot-high yellow wall. Held aloft by nearly invisible wires, they fly out over the heads of onlookers, then swoop back in a single graceful move.

Belly-flopping against the wall, they crumple into little pill-bug shapes. Then, seconds later, they soar out into space again, pairing off in double-decker balance formations--weightless wonders, spacewalkers in an advanced gymnastics class.

This is not an errant cadre from Cirque du Soleil, or a Vegas sideshow gone highbrow. Those sinewy figures twirling overhead are members of Elizabeth Streb’s company, Ringside, performing in the kinetic dance-installation piece “Lookup!”

Streb, a self-described “pop action” artist, makes works that are a cross between formalist circus and artsy bungee jumping. She gets high, so to speak, on scaffolds--and cables, platforms, trampolines and whatever other contraptions might come in handy.

Yet Streb, whose work hasn’t been seen in Los Angeles since 1988, extends the whomp-thwack-thud of bodies colliding to a hyper-athletic aesthetic full of thrills. Her performances send daring young dancers flying (and slamming and crashing) through the air (and off towers and into walls) with anything but the greatest of ease--as the bruises and bangs they sometimes sport attest.

The point, in part, is to capitalize on the human fascination with dangerous feats. “I like event sports: boxing, rodeo,” says Streb, dressed in red sweats, with an electric-green Ace bandage on her left leg, as she sits at a worktable in front of the “Lookup!” wall. “I like people who risk their lives doing things for no really good reason, useless activities that could kill people.”

It’s a natural curiosity that we’re taught to suppress, Streb believes.

“Physicality is inherent in everybody,” she says. “All the things we’re told not to do in order to be good boys and girls are about unlearning a certain joie de vivre and what we know about life absolutely, which is a certain physicality.”

Streb and Ringside have been in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo since the beginning of the month. Their “ACTION OCCUPATION,” marks the reopening of the renovated museum, which has been shuttered since June, 1992, with performances starting Wednesday. The bill includes two premieres and seven works from the Ringside repertory.

“She’s an artist who has been working on developing a new lexicon of movement language,” says curator Julie Lazar, who brought Streb to MOCA for the project, which has been three years in the making.

“I saw power and beauty and skill in her work, but not what we normally consider beautiful,” Lazar says. “Her work is enlivening and exhilarating.”

The cavernous white insides of the Temporary Contemporary are filled with an array of huge primary-colored installations that look like an outsize version of a playground for adults--with a tall pole here, a jungle gym there and various mats and backboards arranged in the 55,000-square-foot area.

It’s a sweaty Saturday afternoon and about 40 people mill about the space, strolling from apparatus to apparatus, checking out the structures or clicking through CD-ROMs about the artist’s work.

About half of the visitors to this “open rehearsal”--one of many during a three-week residency that has been going on since the beginning of this month--watch Streb put her dancers through their paces.

After a group warm-up, there’s a run-through of “Surface,” a piece with a rapid series of group moves putting up, taking down, landing on, walking over and otherwise negotiating several 6-by-8-foot walls.

Next, the company moves over to the contraption built for another piece. Members of the ad hoc audience follow, placing their white plastic chairs in front of two jungle-gym-like towers with a trampoline in the middle and slides on either side.

Ringsiders begin flying off the tower landings, diving into the yellow trampoline in the middle, soaring up to the overhead bars or down to the padded landing mats on the floor.

Then the pace increases and more bodies are added to the mix. Soon, it looks like a free-flowing spigot of bodies tumbling through space but constantly drawn, as though by anti-gravitational force, to the bars overhead.

The work, not surprisingly, is called “UP,” and it is one of the two pieces that Ringside will premiere this week. “UP” is typical of the kind of fare that explains why Streb is an artist who doesn’t fit neatly into any one category of performed art.

Although she has long been associated with the dance world, it is equally appropriate that her works are here to re-inaugurate a visual arts space.

“My interests don’t lie in traditional dance,” she says. “My investigations have been into physics, architecture [and other] things that inform me about movement or human movement potential.”

Streb, 45, also draws on long standing interests that easily predate her first brush with dance.

She was born in Rochester, N.Y., into what she describes as a blue-collar family and grew up watching her mason father work. “What I did get from that was this phenomenal sense of labor,” she says.

Yet her early interest in the nature of work also extended into more playful parts of the universe, such as the acrobats at the circus. “I was incredibly impressed with the nameless people who worked their whole lives on one move,” she says. “It brought tears to my eyes.”

When it came time for college, Streb intended to enroll as a physical education major, since she had always been good at sports. She ended up, though, as a dance major, at State University of New York, Brockport, because “P.E. wasn’t creative enough.”

After graduating in 1972 and spending two years in San Francisco (“mostly because I wanted to ride my motorcycle across the country,” she says), she moved to New York to pursue performance art seriously.

She was a few years too late to catch the experimental dance and performance scene that thrived in Manhattan in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, but there was still a good deal of like-minded creative activity going on.

“The ‘70s were to me the only interesting period in dance,” Streb says. “Once the ‘80s hit, I could sit through a whole evening and not be interested. I used to go to [the downtown performance venue] the Kitchen and all these downtown places for ideas.”

Streb began to focus on her own interests in movement during the late 1970s. She began making her pop action works in 1979, but it wasn’t an easy period.

“I cooked in restaurants to make my money,” Streb says. “I did that for 15 years because there was no way to pay bills with what I was doing.”

Part of the problem was that independent choreographers were regarded warily back then.

“In those days, if you were in a company and you broke off and started to do your own work, you had a reputation and that’s why the critics came,” Streb says. “But independent choreographers were ‘losers’ because they never got in a company.”

That has since changed, however. “In the mid-’80s, there was a paradigm shift, a point where it was considered a little bit cooler to make your own work,” she says.

Streb formed Ringside in 1985 and brought her company to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 1988. The group presented the four-part “Airwork,” which it also took to San Diego, but hasn’t been back since.

Streb nonetheless made an impression on the Los Angeles scene. She has, in fact, been so influential that she spawned a school of sorts, often referred to as Hyperdance.

In citing her as a face to watch in 1995, The Times’ Lewis Segal called Streb “a teacher and role model for a generation of daredevil postmodern innovators.” The genre--which is marked by risky, hyper-athletic, obstacle-course choreography--includes the work of such L.A.-based artists as Jacques Heim, Stephanie Gilliland, Joel Christensen, Frank Guevara, Lori DuPeron and Mehmet Sander.

Sometimes, the work is so like Streb’s that it raises the question of where influence stops and appropriation begins. In a review of a Sander performance in San Diego, for example, Times reviewer Frankie Wright wrote that “Sander’s debt to choreographer Elizabeth Streb is obvious.”

Streb, though, hasn’t seen the work in question and claims not to have any problem with it. “Memo [Sander] was a student of mine,” she says. “I know that these ideas are being investigated, and I couldn’t be happier. Let’s face it, there’s nothing new under the sun.”

The Temporary Contemporary shows feature Streb and her company of eight performers, as well as six Los Angeles-based dancers who have been recruited for the engagement.

They’ll premiere not only “UP” --which Streb and company developed during a recent residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University--but also the MOCA-commissioned “Rise,” which is based around a tall pole from which two dancers are suspended.

“It deals with centripetal force,” Streb says. “The rope winds and unwinds and can pull [the performers] up and down. It’s like riding a wave that pushes them in and out of control, a force that is constantly circling.”

Also on the bill will be “Bounce,” a piece in which seven dancers come hurtling at one another on a spring-loaded floor surface and (they hope) avoid colliding; “Little Ease,” a Streb solo in which the choreographer performs in the confines of a box; “Wall,” a dance performed against a hollow metal wall, and others.

Several of these works were presented when the company performed a two-week run at New York’s Joyce Theater in June. “Elizabeth Streb has turned the Joyce Theater into a circus,” wrote the New York Times’ Jennifer Dunning. “A perfect summer treat, it is all great fun: pretty and cool and undemanding.”

It is clearly accessible work, despite the high-art context in which it is typically presented. Which is exactly what Streb seems to be after. She says she is eager for her performances to reach beyond the confines of the dance world to a larger audience. That’s why she coined the term “pop action.”

“Part of me wants to do something more accessible, and that’s where pop action came from,” she says. “I stopped using [the term] dance because [a] publicist said, ‘You mention the word dance and you automatically lose 90% of your audience.’ That’s just the way it is.”

Streb has also adapted other strategies to advance her populist leanings. She works with ad specialists, rather than graphic artists, when it comes time to publicize her shows. Also, Streb offers participatory programs for children and their families and opens her company rehearsals to the public--as was the case during her Temporary Contemporary residency.

As for the chichi avant-garde, Streb’s been there, done that.

“I was ensconced in the New York downtown arts scene for 20 years. It’s so time-consuming just to figure out how to make the work, pay the bills and get the work produced that I felt like I really didn’t lift my head up out of the sand and look around until about two or three years ago.”

She didn’t like what she saw: “When I did, I got a frame of reference for where I was and the limitations of it and, in fact, the elitism of it. It is already a converted audience. I ended up making something that I think is more accessible than [what is seen in] the downtown dance scene.”

* “ACTION OCCUPATION,” Ringside, MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo. Wednesday-Sept. 3; Wednesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; $18. (213) 626-6828.