Slowly, one by one, I could see people begin to figure it out: that sound. That noise. That music. It’s coming from those women. They’re singing. Or something. When the Igloolik-based troupe Artcirq took the stage in the early hours of this morning at the Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu, much of their act was mystifying, and much had the audience – made up largely of nomadic desert dwellers – thoroughly charmed. But it was the kattadjak, the throatsinging, and especially an extraordinary solo by shy, elfin Celina Kalluk, 29, that really mesmerized the crowd.

"But how does she do that!" sputtered the Malian next to me, as the eerie rhythmic groaning that imitates the wind and the rivers poured over the sand dunes from a high concrete stage at the edge of the oasis.

The festival was running hours late and it was thoroughly cold and windy by the time the Inuit performs took the stage; the air was thick with the smoke of a hundred small charcoal fires. Artcirq’s members sang, juggled, flipped, tumbled, hefted each other in the air, and acted out traditional stories. They draw on feats from the traditional Inuit games; they accompanied much of it with bluesy bass guitar riffs. The crowd-pleaser highlights included a hunting story, acted out with Jacky Qrunngnut, 22, clad in the skin of a polar bear (one they shot two years ago when it came after them while they were caribou hunting), a skit which degenerated into a skillfully acted slapstick that had the crowd roaring. The Tuareg also gasped appreciatively at a kicking contest, won by Jimmy Awa Qamukaq, 19, who leapt from a squat to kick what appeared to be an Arctic char dangling about 9 feet up from a pole.

Many of the young men performed part of the show shirtless, which sometimes seemed to be garnering more attention than their feats of juggling or balancing. "Aren’t they cold?" well-bundled Tuareg seated around me kept asking. I tried to explain that it’s pretty cold where these folks come from, so they’re used to it. "But not as cold as this, surely," they said, huddling together against the chill of the desert night, while the temperature dipped near zero. I could not persuade them otherwise.

Terence Uyarak explained to the crowd that they were performing at nearly the same moment that people back home in Igloolik were celebrating the annual feast at the return of the sun, after months of polar winter dark. But again, no one in this sun-bleached patch of the world could seem to take in the idea that there is a place where the sun doesn’t shine, at all, for months at a time.

The show was not without hitches – the performance space was not the sort the troupe usually uses, and the festival’s lights-and-sound technical specs could best be described as "on the fly." And much of what they did was simply lost on this crowd: the show opened with video footage of the members tromping in parkas against a dark Arctic sky, with just the sound of the snow scrunching under their boots, and it had the audience befuddled. The keen Inuit sense of the absurd that underlies much of the clowning in the show also seemed to be lost on the Euro-and-Malian audience. A heartfelt poem by Solomon Uyarasuk about suicide, which may make a lot of sense when the troupe performs in the Arctic, was bizarrely out of context in the middle of the act here. And many of the Tuareg women, wrapped in dark veils with their faces tattooed with indigo, seemed to find the raw earthiness of the throat singing discomfiting, even disturbing, and turned their faces away from the stage, muttering, when the women sang.

Festival organizers, unfortunately, did nothing to provide the audience with context for who the performers were or what cultural traditions their act draws on. The sole bit of information the master of ceremonies provided was to tell the crowd, repeatedly, that Artcirq changed planes seven times to be here – which mostly made it sound like they had a really bad travel agent.

And yet in Artcirq’s group performances – with some of the young men playing instruments at the back of the stage, some juggling and clowning, some pounding on a qilaut drum, and Ms. Kalluk and Sylvia Cloutier throatsinging – there were obvious echoes of the traditional Tuareg, Dogon and other West African culture whose musicians have performed here, and it was easy to see why festival organizers were keen to unite the two disparate cultures.