If the road to happiness involves satisfying work, then Judith Garay should be the happiest woman on the planet.

“I work virtually all the time,” says the choreographer and artistic director of Dancers Dancing, reached by phone from her company’s Vancouver headquarters. And this month she’s working harder than ever, as she’s coproducing Voices in Motion, Bodies That Sing with the Vancouver Cantata Singers.

This interdisciplinary undertaking, which mixes live choral music and movement, runs at the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from Tuesday through Thursday (March 17 to 19), as part of the Vancouver International Dance Festival. It’s also a 100-mile-diet exercise in local creativity, featuring as it does Vancouver choreographers Garay, Serge Bennathan, Simone Orlando, Rob Kitsos, and Anthony Morgan, along with an assortment of B.C. composers—including Peter Hannan, another artist with a keen interest in what makes human life worth living.

Happiness Index is the title of the four-part work he’s readying for Voices in Motion, Bodies That Sing, and although it doesn’t borrow directly from African music, it’s definitely inspired by the time that Hannan has spent in Lesotho, where his wife, Dr. Karen Stancer, mentors health-care workers dealing with AIDS.

“It’s, like, the poorest country in the world, with every problem that entails,” Hannan explains, in a separate telephone interview. “But the thing that really struck me from being there is that people are no more or less happy or no more or less complaining than anyone I know here.”

Inspired by their resilience, Hannan has composed a suite of four discrete songs. One is based on an unsettling conversation he had in Lesotho, during which he was asked if he “was all right” with the western world’s wealth. Another celebrates the happiest person he knows, Donald’s Market clerk Carmen Louie. And a third draws on the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud.

“Freud, in typical fashion, doesn’t try and offer you a 12-step program or anything,” Hannan explains. “He’s pretty clear that happiness is something that was never planned to be. In fact, I use something that’s sort of like a paraphrase of what Freud says, which is ”˜The intention that people should be happy does not seem to be included in the plan of creation.’ He doesn’t tell you how to solve that problem; he just says ”˜That’s the problem. Live with it.’ ”

Garay, who’s choreographing Hannan’s piece, says that Happiness Index offers an enjoyable challenge for singers and dancers alike—especially as the score calls for the Cantata vocalists to create their own percussion.

“Peter showed me some videos of his visit to Africa,” she notes, “and I used some of the gestures that the people were doing in the video as part of the vocabulary for some of the movement. And another thing that really inspired me was the rhythms in his music—and the clapping, which is really unusual, I think, in choral music. I used that as a reoccurring theme in different ways.”

Both artists report that the work’s themes have got them thinking about what makes them happy, although only Hannan has come to any kind of definitive conclusion.

“Maybe it’s music,” he says. “Music and love: that’s it!”