It’s an often-repeated misconception that the dancers in Antony Tudor’s ballets move like human beings. They don’t; they move like Tudor ballet dancers, defined by a unique movement language. Throughout the next year, dance audiences will enjoy expanded opportunities to interpret this language as part of Tudor’s centennial celebration festivities.

Tudor died in 1987 at age 79, and would have celebrated his 100th birthday on Friday, April 4. He was born William Cook to a working-class family in London, and began to study ballet only as a young adult, which probably enabled as well as mandated his iconoclastic use of traditional ballet vocabulary. In 1940, Tudor came to New York to join the newly created Ballet Theatre, where his work scored an immediate and sensational success. He continued to work at what became American Ballet Theatre until his death, but his ballets also entered the repertories of companies all over America and the world.

I was lucky to be able to watch Tudor’s rehearsals with ABT in the very last years of his life. Time had both mellowed and withered the choreographer, but he certainly lived up to his caustic reputation. His dry wit was frequently in evidence, and it was sometimes leavening, but he was nevertheless a stern, exacting, relentless taskmaster. I was surprised that his working methods weren’t as Proustian as legend would have it. Details of gesture and character concerned him, and he would sometimes ask the dancers to review their characters’ internal motivations. But his priorities seemed rooted above all in physical approach and energy, in the dancers’ complete physical immersion in the movement, in their attention to every nuance of his kinetic expression.

Although there was a profusion of Tudor stagings in the years immediately before and after his death, there has been an attrition in the amount of Tudor performed over the last decade. This year, however, Tudor will receive his due, with his work being performed all around the country. At the opening gala of its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House next month, ABT will give a specially cast performance of his poignant and corrosive “Judgment of Paris.” And although ABT has performed only one Tudor work a year in recent seasons, when it comes to City Center next fall, it will revive “Lilac Garden,” not seen at ABT since 2000, and “Pillar of Fire,” last performed there in 2004, as well as devote a gala evening entirely to his work. But none of the great European companies that have performed Tudor — London’s Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, and St. Petersburg’s Kirov among them — have announced plans to perform his work during his centennial.

In the meantime, New York has been hosting its own mini-Tudor celebration as part of a lead-up to his centennial. At Juilliard on March 29 and 30, a two-day tribute to Tudor was convened by the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, which is headed by Sally Brayley Bliss, and the Juilliard Alumni Association. There were both onstage and workshop classes and performances by Juilliard students, students of ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, ABT II, and the New York Theatre Ballet. There were sessions of reminiscence as well as two informative panels, featuring Tudor dancers, scholars, stagers, and Elizabeth Sawyer, his longtime piano accompanist at Juilliard, where he taught for 20 years.

But there were notable absences — former ballerina Sallie Wilson, who danced the Tudor repertory at ABT in the 1960s and 1970s among them. No absence, however, was so noticeable as that of Airi Hynninen, Tudor’s assistant at ABT during the 1970s and ’80s, who drew up most of the notation scores for Tudor’s ballets (Tudor was a great believer in dance notation). Ms. Hynninen was not invited to speak at either panel, and indeed, both she and Ms. Wilson seem to have become estranged from the Tudor Trust in recent years, which, while unfortunate, has resulted in some favorable circumstances for New York dance audiences. During the past decade, Ms. Wilson has worked primarily with the New York Theatre Ballet, and at the Florence Gould Hall last week, NYTB performed a mixed program that included Ms. Wilson’s stagings of “Lilac Garden,” “Little Improvisations,” and “Judgment of Paris.” Ms. Hynninen has not staged a full-length Tudor work since the beginning of this decade. For NYTB’s program, however, she staged the bedroom duet from Tudor’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which has not been seen in its entirety for 30 years.

One of Tudor’s greatest works is his penultimate ballet, “The Leaves Are Fading,” which he created for ABT in 1975. Atypically in Tudor’s work, “Leaves” does not purport to tell a story. Last fall, ABT revived “Leaves” for its City Center season, staged by ex-ABT dancers Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner. We saw again how the multiple duets in “Leaves” almost seem all the richer because they lack specificity. Even at this late stage in his career, Tudor, who was not very prolific, was able to wring new changes on his characteristic steps and syntax and come up with movements and phrases not ever seen before in his choreography, or anyone else’s.

Tudor had been the sun around which a close-knit group of favored interpreters at ABT during the 1940s revolved. They included Nora Kaye and Tudor’s longterm partner, Hugh Laing (as well as Diana Adams, Laing’s wife for a while). Tudor’s immersion in a cliquish group of intimates is perhaps the origin of the bugaboo clinging to his ballets as ingrown and hermetic, requiring mystagogues rather than ballet masters. But this is ridiculous. Any well-trained ballet dancer with the inclination and opportunity to excel at Tudor can bring his work to life.