Imagine watching such rich and diverse performances as choreographer Bill T. Jones, the Gyuoto Monks and musicians from the Newport Jazz Festival, all within a 10-week period.

Now imagine exploring in-depth the contexts for these genres for a deeper understanding and enjoyment of the arts. To top it off, collect four units to satisfy a general-education requirement in the process.

Sound like a winning combination? That's why "Arts Encounters: Exploring Arts Literacy in the Twenty-First Century," a course that professors Robert Winter and Robert Israel will teach this winter in the School of the Arts and Architecture, is not your typical sit-at-your-desk-and-read-this-textbook kind of class.

Winter, a classically trained pianist, scholar and pioneer in bringing the arts into the digital world, taught it for the first time last year after faculty had spent years mulling over the idea of launching a broad interdisciplinary introduction to the arts curriculum.

What is essential to such a broad-based class is continuity, Winter explained. "You just can't do Bali one day and Beethoven the next and expect people to connect the dots," he said.

So Winter and Israel, a renowned set designer of theater and opera, plan to provide that continuity from different vantage points as students travel over the artistic landscape of Los Angeles, experiencing dance, world music, opera, theater and the visual arts at a number of venues. In some cases, artists will come to UCLA to perform for and speak to the class.

While Winter will bring to the course his expertise as a performer as well as a scholar, Israel will come to it from a slightly different perspective.

"I'm involved with the production and the design, and the conductor if it's an opera," Israel explained. "I come at it from a point of view that is critical, but from a creative rather than, say, an analytical one. I interpret the opera visually on stage. So what I add to the course is an interpretive quality."

The course will also tap the expertise of others at UCLA. Last year, Chris Waterman, chairman of the World Arts and Cultures Department, Michael Hackett of the Theater Department and others, both scholars and performers, were guest lecturers. The result is that students get a broad, yet in-depth perspective on the arts from different voices and disciplines, the professors said.

"Art doesn't communicate; it communes," Israel said of this collaborative approach.

The course also will take students behind the curtain and beyond what occurs on stage. Students will see how the roles of the designer, producer, choreographer, composer, director and performer are defined, and how they interact.

"It will be an experience unlike any you have had in other classes," Winter said enthusiastically, "like jumping into the arts ocean and swimming around in it. It's an experience you don't get by occasionally going to a concert with your parents or a friend. It's almost like getting a backstage pass to art."