A director provides vision, constructs frameworks, and creates logic; a director choreographs performers according to an internal sensibility with the hopes of affecting an audience's own vision. Philip Bither may not be a stage director himself, but, as the Walker's performing arts curator, he does all these things on a grand scale through his extremely thoughtful, rich, arousing programming. He has reinvigorated the local performing-arts scene like no one else in quite a while, exposing us to what the rest of the world is doing onstage. We're lucky to have him.