Arklow’s sleek new wastewater treatment plant is a collaborative triumph between engineers, contractors and architects Clancy Moore. And it’s amazingly unsmelly…

“Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore . Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.

The project is in illustrious company. The tradition of making dirty functional structures into objects of pride and beauty gave the world such things as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the noble, deco-ish ventilation towers of the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool and the Wirral. When Joseph Bazalgette installed London’s sewage system in the 1860s and 70s, he created parks and gardens and well-appointed public spaces on the river embankments that contain giant sewers, and ornate structures such as the neo-Byzantine pumping station in Abbey Mills, east London. The Arklow project, argues Clancy, is an opportunity to make visible the billions that are usually spent unseen on the public good of clean water.

Royal Opera House, London
An immensely satisfying tribute to the choreographer is full of invention, emotion and dazzling precision

George Balanchine’s Serenade has the most beautiful opening in ballet. Seventeen women standing like statues, bathed in cool blue light, raise one hand in the air, palms outwards, as the music of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings surges around them. It has the most elegiac closing moment too, as a single standing ballerina is lifted aloft by four men, curved arms flung behind her, arching into the unknown.

The rest of the piece, made in 1934 for students of the Russian-born choreographer’s nascent school in the US, is just about perfect. It incorporates mundane daily events – a student running in late, a stumble, a woman unpinning her hair – and turns them into mysterious art. In its ceaseless, inventive movement it makes space visible, as the dancers seem to mould the air they move through.

Balanchine: Three Signature Works is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 8 April

Royal Opera’s new associate director on her obsession with Peter Grimes, winning over tech-sceptics and the joy of school matinee shows

Born in London, where she still lives, to an artist mother and musician father, Netia Jones is the new associate director of the Royal Opera. Known for using immersive installations, film and VR, her operas include Alice in Wonderland , Least Like the Other with Brian Irvine, which won the Ivor Novello best opera award, and Peter Grimes , which finished its run last week at the Gothenburg Opera House. Next year she will curate the Royal Ballet and Opera’s first opera and technology festival, RBO/Shift.

The first opera you ever saw, when you were 10, was Peter Grimes . How has it been to revisit the tragic fisherman ’s tale?
Relentless! It’s such a brilliant story but so bleak; it gets under your skin. Doing it in Gothenburg, which was cold and very wet, was perfect, although not the best thing for your mental health.

Michelle Williams shines as a woman with terminal cancer hitting Tinder; dirt is dished in a demise-of-Twitter doc; Helen Mirren unleashes her Irish accent on London’s criminal underworld. Plus, the Australian drama that gets autism right

Dying for Sex ( Disney+ )
Twitter: Breaking the Bird (BBC Two) | iPlayer
MobLand ( Paramount+ )
Austin (BBC One) | iPlayer

I can’t quite put my finger on the tone of new Disney+ US dramedy Dying for Sex . There’s sex and death, of course. The series is based on the real-life story of fortysomething Molly Kochan, who, on receiving an incurable breast cancer diagnosis, left her husband and embarked on a kinky sex quest until her death in 2019 (Kochan discussed her experiences with her friend Nikki Boyer, which were turned into a Wondery podcast). Finally it struck me: sweetness. While sex and death are amply represented, from giant vibrators to near-death hallucinations, it’s the sweetness that stays with you, burning through the melancholy and rocket-fuelling the humour.

Tate Britain, London
From digital avatars in limbo or distress to a poignant reliving of his father’s last days, the artist seeks to ‘reimagine life’s chaos’ in this major retrospective of his prolific career to date

A mesmerising film by the British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) shows a pianist performing – with excruciating difficulty – what seem to be arbitrary chords in some mysterious sequence. Straining and sighing, pausing and deliberating, he appears to be guessing the notes. Yet every strike is right, or so the visible relief running through his face and body appears to confirm. Except that the pianist is not real, and nor are his emotions.

The man is a digital avatar of Atkins himself, his performance translated by motion capture into this hyperreal model. The excessively perfect rendering of every imperfection, from stubble to wen, gives it away. But so do the movements of eyes and head, which have a trace of the super-glide smoothness of CGI – expertly programmed and yet still unable to capture the vagaries of human vitality.

An impelling US road-trip for our times; an enlightening cultural history of female friendships; and a bond forged over butterflies for a son and his dying father

Ariel Courage
Chatto & Windus , £16.99, pp304

To order Bad Nature , Bad Friend or The Flitting go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Working alongside NY’s hottest chefs took its toll on Laurie Woolever, but in a new memoir she opens up about her battles with drinking, drugs – and losing her friend

Laurie Woolever is an expert on indulgence. The first time we met was in a dimly lit omakase restaurant in downtown Tokyo, in the summer of 2017. We were both in Japan on respective work trips. Woolever was researching a travel book she was writing with her boss, the chef Anthony Bourdain, and I was filming a CNN digital spin-off series from his Parts Unknown show. We were introduced through mutual friends in New York, where I had been living that year, and where her reputation preceded her. She was known to be private, tough, with a wickedly dry sense of humour. I was a little intimidated.

As she expertly navigated a seven-course tasting menu of wagyu beef with her chopsticks, she casually mentioned that she’d recently stopped drinking, alluding to the fact it had become out of control. I self-consciously sipped my own cold beer, picked up sweet strips of marbled meat and couldn’t help thinking how tricky giving up drinking must have been, both because of her job as the then long-term assistant to Bourdain – one of the most rock’n’roll food personalities of our time – but also being immersed in a fast-paced New York food scene where drinking to excess was the norm. What I didn’t realise until reading her new memoir, Care and Feeding , was that while Woolever wasn’t drinking, she was still seeking hits of illicit pleasure. A few days after our dinner, she hired a Japanese male sex worker to join her for an “erotic massage” at her hotel. A clinical act to numb the discomfort she felt, trapped in an unhappy marriage without alcohol to smooth over the cracks.

Snow White has sparked outrage across the board, but why is no one worried about its messaging on beauty?

Last week I took my daughter to see the new Snow White film and on the train she told me how all the girls had been called into a special assembly. It was to tell them that makeup was strictly forbidden – some girls (she discreetly told me their names, vaguely scandalised) had started wearing mascara to school. And as she spoke I was immediately propelled to 1991, my friend’s kitchen, the violet smell of other people’s laundry, her mother explaining that we shouldn’t wear makeup until we were, “At least 40,” because it was just, “for covering wrinkles and the shadows of age.” That conversation has rattled around in my head for decades (“the shadows of age”) and it lodged there as I settled in with my popcorn.

The new Snow White has been plagued by so much controversy some might assume the marketing team had bitten a cursed apple. It took nine years to make it into cinemas, after, OK: Rachel Zegler’s casting sparked a racist backlash; actors with dwarfism debated the ethics of portraying (in Disney’s words) the “ seven characters ’,”; and critics (including the son of a director who worked on the 1937 film, to the Telegraph ) complained that Disney is “making up new woke things”. Then, in August, a member of a pro-Palestine campaign called for a boycott of the film , citing Gal Gadot’s (who plays the evil queen) support of Israel’s military actions. Rightwing press were next to call for a boycott, after Zegler spoke out first in support of Palestine and then against Trump, leading Disney ( allegedly ) to scale back the eventual premiere. And then it was here, and the reviews were… grumpy. The New Yorker headlined its review with: “Disney’s remake whistles but doesn’t work.”