The welcome reception to participants and accompanying persons will take place at the Conference venue, the Palacio de Congresos de Valencia, designed by Sir Norman Foster and chosen as the World’s Best Convention Centre in 2010. The event will include a welcome cocktail reception and a classical Flamenco Dance Performance.

Gravitation is the scientific topic of inspiration of the classical Flamenco Dance Performance. The show will consist on a series of multi-space, open-air performances on various small wooden platforms distributed around the welcome reception area. Several disconnected performances will take place, based and inspired on flamenco and Spanish dancing. A guitar player on one platform, a woman dancer on another one ... interacting in random ways. Meeting participants will be surrounded by several styles of mesmerizing classical flamenco music and performances.

A public performance will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the observation of the solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 from Príncipe Island, in the west coast of Africa, and Sobral, in northeastern Brazil. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, light rays from distant stars passing near the Sun would bend because of the curvature of the space-time due to the presence of the Sun. The two British expeditions were the first to measure the deflection of light by massive bodies and to prove the correctness of General Relativity.

An open public space as the Botanical Garden of the University of Valencia is the perfect location for a show about the 1919 British eclipse expeditions. It will be executed by a number of contemporary-style-dressed performers. The duration of this performance will be around 20 minutes. Before the show itself, professional scientists will explain the experiment to the general public in a simple and understandable manner. Then, in a spontaneous way the performance will start accompanied by music.

Diversity Lunch. The GR22 and Amaldi13 conferences will host a Diversity and Inclusion Lunch. It is intended as a social-peer platform to celebrate diversity, discuss challenges, and collaborate on strategies to bolster diversity and inclusion. Lunch attendees will have the opportunity to share their personal views and life experiences on specific issues. Those include (but are not limited to) race, ethnicity and culture; age and professional experience; gender identity and sexual orientation; (dis)ability and impairments; religious beliefs; work-life-balance and needs of parents. For participation in the Diversity and Inclusion Lunch please contact the Code-of-Conduct Committee.

Gabriela González is a professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University searching for gravitational waves with the LIGO team. She was born in Córdoba, Argentina, studied at the University of Córdoba, and pursued her Ph.D. in Syracuse University, obtained in 1995. She was a staff scientist in the LIGO group at MIT, joined the faculty at Penn State in 1997 and moved to LSU. She received awards from the American Physical Society, the American Astronomical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences. She has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 1997, serving as spokesperson in 2011-2017, and participated in the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016. Her group works on LIGO instrument development, reducing noise sources and tuning alignment systems, and data diagnostics.

Contemporary dance performance inspired by the detection of gravitational waves from binary neutron star merger GW170817. The public talk of Prof. Gabriela González will be followed by a dancing performance in the Santiago Grisolía auditorium. This performance will be inspired by the multi-instrument detection of GW170817, the result of the merger of two neutron stars which took place around 130 million light-years from us. The show will include references to all the processes involved in the merger and to all the important discoveries that followed, through background images linked with the dancing performance itself. The performers will be students of the Conservatorio Superior de Danza de Valencia.

The gala dinner and the tribute to Stephen Hawking will be held at the Príncipe Felipe Science Museum. This museum has become a reference point for interactive science. Its main objective is stimulating curiosity and critical thinking and at the same time surprising and amusing the public by its contents from the world of science, technology, and the environment. The spectacular building designed by Santiago Calatrava contains over 26,000 square meters of exhibitions on current scientific and technical matters.

In addition to the scientific program of plenary and parallel sessions of the conference, the Local Organizing Committee, in full accordance with the Scientific Organizing Committee, is planning an event during the gala dinner to pay tribute to Prof. Stephen Hawking. The homage will be conducted by Prof. Eric Poisson, as President of the ISGRG. It will consist on speeches by Profs. Malcolm MacCallum, Gary Horowitz, Marika Taylor, and Harvey Reall, who will offer each an insider's perspective on specific aspects of the life and science of the late Stephen Hawking along with some personal anecdotes. In addition, Profs. Jim Hartle, Don Page, Leonard Parker, and Kip Thorne have accepted to prepare each one a short video on their thoughts on Stephen and on his main scientific achievements. These videos will be screened at the end of the dinner, as a way to close the tribute.

At the end of the event, Italian singer/songwriter Flavio Bánterla will perform the song "L.I.G.O.", from his album "Mystic Pop" (Warner Music / BMG 2018): the love story of two merging black holes who discover that the present moment is the only time that matters. This tale about unity and division is an inspiring tribute to the detection of GW150914 by the L.I.G.O. observatory.

The selected scenes combine electroacustic music and synchronized video images, vocal soloists and mimes showing physical and mathematical concepts that Archimedes developed and applied to mechanical and pneumatic machines. Dashow adds some artistic licenses towards the end: shortly before dying, Archimedes imagines present-day physics, mathematics and cosmology (Feynman diagrams, string theory, the Big Bang, the multiverse, etc.).

In collaboration with the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Valencia, Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Valencia and ISEACV.

PROGRAMME POSTER

James Dashow (1944, Chicago, USA) is a composer of electroacoustic music, instrumental music and opera. One of the first composers for digital audio synthesis, he studied with Arthur Berger and Goffredo Petrassi (Fullbright scholarship), and was invited by G. Tisato to work at the computer center of the University of Padua, where he created the first computer-based compositions. He has lectured at MIT and Princeton University and continues to teach master classes and concerts in Europe and North America. He has been vice-president of the "International Computer Music Association". He is the author of the MUSIC30 language for digital sound synthesis and inventor of the Dyad system. For several years, he co-produced a weekly program of contemporary music for RAI in collaboration with Riccardo Bianchini. The most important awards and prizes he has received include the "Prix Magistere" de Bourges (2000), the Guggenheim Foundation (1989) the Koussevitzky Foundation (1998), and in 2011 the CEMAT Foundation awarded him the prize for his entire career in recognition for his exceptional contributions to electro-acoustic music.
JAMES DASHOW'S WEBSITE

The Planetarium Opera, will be celebrated at the Hemisfèric (how to get there). Hemisferic, was the first element to be built at the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències. The Hemisfèric, opened on April 10th 1998, is a unique and spectacular building designed by Santiago Calatrava and represents a large human eye, surrounded by water to enhance its beauty. It houses the planetarium and the largest IMAX Dome cinema in Spain.