DANCE REVIEW : An About-Face by Gus Solomons : Choreography: A dance maker known for his intellectual works introduces a piece so un-cerebral that its title isn’t even a word.

Gus Solomons Jr. is a curiously unsung pioneer in black choreography--a dance maker who embraced the formal preoccupations of Merce Cunningham as his birthright long before other artists of color championed abstraction.

Purity of design, high intelligence and a disarming gentility distinguished Solomons’ work when he served as the dean of dance at CalArts in the late ‘70s, and they again informed his dances Saturday at Cal State Long Beach. But Solomons also had a surprise or two to unleash in this belated return to Southern California.

“Steps 13: Thirteens” (1989) gave us the Solomons we remember: the brainy manipulator of spacing and sequencing who could arrange a playful display for his seven-member company using random movement motifs. Some of these themes were bald (an abrupt shoulder tilt, for example), some flashy (an intricate leg twist), but they all knitted together perfectly as Solomons ingeniously reworked them in canon, in unison, in mirror synchrony, in chain-duets, in juxtaposition to newer motifs, etc.

The dancing also adroitly reflected the shifting densities of music by Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, who composed the sound-score for Solomons’ 1989 “Skew” as well. Here the choreographer again explored structural gambits (including simultaneity), unifying the piece with a sculptural statement: a dancer’s arm extended and bent back with the hand touching the shoulder.

Most of all, however, “Skew” was about partnering: same-sex partnering no less than men dancing with women. Indeed, in Solomons’ rigorously mathematical vision of duet-relationships, every dancer eventually paired off with both a male and a female--just as every lifter became a liftee.

Unfortunately, the smaller dancers of both sexes often couldn’t cope with porteur duties without strain, and the rather desperately jocular leapfrogging for men suggested that Solomons himself may have been uncomfortable with the implications of guys dancing together. Not for long.

The title of Solomons’ newest work is a line graph: an inch of vaguely seismological peaks and valleys on a three-line staff. No words, just symbols of motion. The piece itself uses a Toby Twining vocal score to accompany an intense bonding ritual for five bare-chested men in ankle-length skirts.

This is a work utterly unlike the Solomons we knew--one marked by brooding atmosphere and mysterious, quasi-dramatic confrontations. The men dance together as if ordained for it and there are gestures of self-flagellation that become increasingly recurrent. At the end, we look at an empty stage and hear the cries of the men who have just whirled out of view.

Obviously a rite of passage--but to what? In this AIDS era, a time of rising homophobia, our first interpretations may be sociological, but the work scarcely limits itself to one agenda. Solomons hasn’t switched off his brainpower here, but he uses form as a vessel for feeling: far from his usual game. The result is as haunting as it is thoroughly unexpected.