I am playing around with the new iOS 5 features and trying to rewriting one of my apps as pure iOS 5 app using the new storyboarding feature.
To cut a long story short,
It sounds like you need to use the performSegueWithIdentifier method. Make sure both views are in the same storyboard, link them together using a Push segue, and give that segue a name. Then, from your first view controller's code simply call the performSegueWithIdentifier to perform a manual segue.
Hope this helps!
See also: Conditionally following a segue
Cheers, Jesse L. Zamora