Pina BauschChoreographer andcompany director, 58What she’s done:...

Pina Bausch

Choreographer and

company director, 58

What she’s done: Bausch, born and trained in Germany, with additional dance studies in New York, has become one of the most influential choreographers of the past quarter-century, renowned for developing an intensely dramatic, yet nonlinear, intuitive and often controversial form of Expressionist movement-theater. Up to now, her company, based in Wuppertal, Germany, has visited Southern California only twice: for the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 and on tour in 1996 with the specially commissioned “Nur Du.”

Outlook for ‘99: Coming to UCLA in October, Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal will dance “Nelken,” a full-evening signature work she wanted included on the ’96 tour but which had to be dumped because of the cost of transporting the massive “Nur Du” redwood-grove set. Choreographed in 1983, “Nelken” features hundreds of carnations carpeting the stage: a symbol of fragile innocence trampled underfoot by the realities of modern relationships.

David Rousseve

Choreographer, writer,

director, dancer, actor, 39

What he’s done: Rousseve, an L.A.-based

Texan who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton, is most celebrated for a series of visionary dance-based, mixed-media performances that fused his preppy contemporary persona with the radically different identity and experiences of his dead Creole grandmother. Indeed, “Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams” at UCLA in 1994 ended with Rousseve transforming himself, body and soul, into her likeness: an incredible metamorphosis.

Outlook for ‘99: In “Love Songs,” at UCLA in May, Rousseve again explores the process of integrating past and present by dramatizing the clash between classic romantic myths and the everyday tensions and cruelties of human relationships. The setting: a cobwebby grand ballroom. The music: soprano arias from vintage German and Italian operas. The cast: Rousseve, his ad hoc company Reality and a chorus drawn from each community where the work is performed.

Ethan Stiefel

American Ballet Theatre dancer, 25

What he’s done: The Pennsylvania-born Stiefel joined the corps of New York City Ballet at age 16 and rose to principal status there by 1995--after a year off to dance in Zurich. He joined ABT as a principal in 1997 and has not appeared with the company in Southern California.

Outlook for ‘99: Stiefel is the bare-chested jumper shown on all the posters and brochures for ABT’s weeklong “Le Corsaire” engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in February. And no wonder: “Technically perfect,” wrote New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff about him in November. “Light and unaffected in his virtuosity, polished in his final turns a la seconde, Mr. Stiefel gave a performance to remember” In the New Yorker the same month, critic Joan Acocella called him “probably the most advanced male ballet dancer in the world,” emphasizing his resemblance to some obscure Latvian dude named Baryshnikov.