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. : THEATER : Savion Glover

We’ve watched him grow up onstage, from gangly adolescent to master choreographer and dancer. At 12, he was the Tap Dance Kid on Broadway. Just a few years later, he was performing with the legends--Bunny Briggs and Lon Chaney in “Black and Blue” on Broadway; Harold Nicholas and Sammy Davis Jr. in the movie “Tap.”

By 18, he was clearly the future of tap, dancing as fast, if not as smoothly, as reigning king Gregory Hines, playing the young Jelly Roll to Hines’ grown-up Morton in “Jelly’s Last Jam.”

Now, at 22, Savion Glover uses everything he knows as choreographer, co-conceiver and electrifying performer in “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater.

In “Noise/Funk,” a history of tap from slave days to the current, hard-driving street variety, Glover has preserved the American origins of tap and simultaneously stomped away all vestiges of Uncle Tom-ism that have hung on from the happy-chappy days of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

In Glover’s steps, tap is a virtuoso form of self-expression, of rage and individual character--a joyful, raucous sound.