Several of the biggest names in Korean and Japanese hip-hop will be taking the stage for a summer music festival next weekend in Korea, according to the concert’s promoter TYPE Communication on Friday.

TYPE announced in a press release that Japanese rappers Zeebra, Simon and Dabo will be performing along Korean artists such as LeeSSang and Jung-in, Supreme Team, Double K and SOUL DIVE for the “What’s Up Summer Hiphop Festival” to be held at the Walker Hill Theater on August 28.

The music fest will also feature the performances by Korean DJs DJ R2 and DJ Freekay.

“We hope that this concert which features the best artists in Korean and Japanese hip-hop, will create a place for our music festival in the long run,” an official from TYPE explained.

Zeebra is one of the most popular rappers in Japan since his first appearance in 1995. He has also performed live with various rappers in the United States.

Dabo first appeared in the Japanese hip-hop scene in the 1990s and has released three albums since 2002. His lyrics are hard-edged and represent a tough Japanese street culture.

LeeSSang is Korean hip-hop duo composed of Gary and Gil. They formed in 2002, collaborating with Drunken Tiger, T and Big Mama King.

Jung-in released her first album “From Andromeda” earlier this year which features the title track “I Hate You.”

Supreme Team is another hip-hop duo featuring members E-Sens and Simon D. They have two albums titled “Supremier” and “Spin Off.”

Double K, whose real name is Sohn Chang-il, is a rapper who is a member of the Korean hip hop music collective Movement Crew.

SOUL DIVE, a hip-hop trio, made their debut in 2009 with their first album “Mad Scientist & Sweet Monsters.”

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The first act of the day is one who doesn’t deserve the crappy time slot: B.o.B., a chart-climbing hip-hop newbie with one of the year’s best-selling records. He’s a double-edged attack — one minute spitting quick, punchy rhymes at the growing crowd, the next playing guitar like an indie rocker, even covering a little of Vampire Weekend’s “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance.” (There’s a cynical joke in there somewhere about the kids about to be assaulted by corporate shilling for three days …) Atlanta’s B.o.B. can deliver something for everyone. “Letter From Vietnam” is a guitar ballad, a ’60s — or maybe just Lenny Kravitz-like — protest song. He picked up a guitar for it, then asked permission to keep playing it, as if he were breaking some rules to crossover back and forth. He held up his hip-hop, taunting us with “Past My Shades” and making the women in the crowd smile with “Nothin’ on You” (“Beautiful girls / all over the world …”). He mixed the rock and the rap in “Don’t Let Me Fall.” Fun, cheery, a good opener to the weekend’s smorgasbord.

The fields are filling up, and be warned: They’re not completely dry from the rain earlier in the week. Several spots are still squishy, with the potential for turning into complete pudding once the weight of thousands squeezes the water out. Don’t wear your favorite shoes.

The notoriously extravagant festival toned down the glitz for this year’s crisis-era bash and was lighter than usual in star power, but it still saw celebs like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sashay up the fabled red carpet.

Billed as a battle of auteur titans, it mostly lived up to expectations, with Britain’s Independent on Sunday calling it “a superior vintage” and France’s Journal du Dimanche declaring “the return of great cinema”.

And scandal came in the form of Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist”, which provoked fainting, gasps and walk-outs and received an “anti-prize” that the festival director angrily denounced as an attempt at censorship.

Four previous Palme d’Or winners — Tarantino, Campion, Von Trier and Ken Loach — squared up against the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Michael Haneke, Johnnie To and Park Chan-wook for Sunday’s award.

Penelope Cruz — a hot tip for best actress award for her role in Almodovar’s flick — was among the A-list celebrities at the 12-day annual French Riviera bash, who also included Martin Scorsese and Jim Carrey.

As the jury headed by French actress Isabelle Huppert deliberated on which of the 20 films will scoop the Palme at the gala awards ceremony later Sunday, a French prison drama was among critics’ favourites.

Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet,” about a prison stint for an illiterate French-Arab youth which turns into an education in crime, “instantly takes its place alongside the greats of the crime movie genre,” said The Times.

A win for Audiard would be a triumph for French cinema, a year after high-school drama “The Class” became the first homegrown movie in more than two decades to pick up the Palme.

Critics cited as another possible winner the Austrian director Haneke’s “The White Ribbon”, a chilling black-and-white study of malice in a German village on the eve of World War I.

New Zealander Campion’s “Bright Star” ode to the doomed poet John Keats was also being touted, as was “Broken Embraces” by Almodovar, which recounts a tragic love affair between a young actress and an ageing director.

Loach’s comedy “Looking for Eric” — starring soccer legend Eric Cantona — also impressed critics, while reviewers had high hopes for veteran director Alain Resnais for “Wild Grass” and Italy’s Marco Bellochio’s “Vincere”, a tale on Mussolini’s bastard son.

Tarantino’s march up the red carpet — flanked by Pitt and his wife Jolie — for the world premiere of his long-awaited “Inglourious Basterds” on Wednesday provided the biggest celebrity buzz of the 12-day festival.

But the director of “Pulp Fiction” divided critics with his war story of Jewish-American soldiers on a mission to murder Nazis.

The festival opened on May 13 with Disney-Pixar’s 3D cartoon caper “Up” — screening out of competition — but it quickly delivered movies not at all suitable for kids.

Blood and guts were aplenty in Tarantino’s work, while Von Trier’s gothic thriller also dished up the gore and blood flowed freely in a tale of a Korean vampire priest in Park Chan-wook’s “Thirst”.

French director Gaspar Noe’s “Enter The Void” also sparked a few walk-outs with its explicit sex and a close-up of an aborted foetus.

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman unveiled “The Time that Remains”, a bittersweet farce on his family history and the daily life of Israeli Arabs.

And Ang Lee brought sex and drugs and rock n’ roll to the festival with “Taking Woodstock”. The film on the iconic 1969 music festival was well received but judged a “low-wattage” offer from the Oscar-winning director.

The late Heath Ledger’s unfinished stint in Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” was screened out of competition, while “Spider-Man” director Sam Raimi returned to horror with his new flick “Drag Me To Hell”.

Suspense grips Cannes as movie mega-battle ends

But on Tuesday’s opening night of her “Circus” tour at the New Orleans Arena, Britney Spears, the mighty Aphrodite with the troublesome tawdry streak, nonetheless renewed her claim as one of the world’s most adept manipulators of the public interest. Powering through a 90-minute show that integrated her impetuous teenhits with the more perverse material from the albums she released after a very public breakdown that made her a constant in the tabloids, the Louisiana native flashed her famous good ol’ girl smile at the fans, mostly female, who still find her a worthy patron saint of the erotic arts.

The intensely bespangled show — which sticks closely to the big-top theme that also defines her latest album — featured a huge array of tricks and extra players, including jugglers, clowns, magicians, martial artists, acrobats and rings of fire. Somewhere in there was Spears herself, looking hearteningly happy as she took on the role of ring mistress, clearly relishing the chance to prove herself healthy and in control.

The evening began with a performance by the Big Apple Circus that included a female acrobat who stumbled once on the beam but got right up and performed a stunning back flip. The faux pas wasn’t staged, but might have been; Spears has similarly stumbled, nearly losing her children in a custody battle, and then losing control of her own affairs after her father was declared her legal guardian last year. This tour is her all-important comeback; if it fails, her career will effectively be over.

It will not fail. She is back up on the beam. The director, Jamie King, has made sure of that. If your star is a bit unstable, the best solution is to surround her with a backing troupe that can step in when she fumbles. Much like her music, the “Circus” tour is all about added value. Instead of purchasing the coolest new beats and synth-pop augmentations, King and Spears signed up those experienced carny stars to not only fill in the gaps between numbers but enhance — distract from? — her own time onstage.

One constant challenge for Spears and her collaborators is how to adapt the soft-core erotica at the heart of her self-expression to the family audience that’s somehow stuck with her since she left “The All New Mickey Mouse Club.” The circus motif proved ideal. Circuses are magical and creepy, home to pink-tutu-wearing high-wire princesses and creepy bearded ladies, loved by children but famously run by flim-flam artists and freaks. In the circus, Spears finds her perfect metaphor for her own life as the world’s favorite fallen angel. This particular iteration of a theme that Madonna and Christina Aguilera have also explored neatly balanced the wholesome with the downright nasty; though its scenarios were obvious, they still worked well under Spears’ command.

Most daring was a sequence that began with a video that showed masked interlopers borrowed from the Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut,” who writhed about on divans as Spears mouthed the Marilyn Manson version of the Eurythmics song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This”). Spears then emerged to reenact the scene wearing two versions of a white-gold gymnast’s leotard with her erogenous zones highlighted in black. She gave a lap dance to a clown; she was lifted aloft by a pair of acrobats and did some simulated heavy petting. In truth, nothing matched the raciest moments of Janet Jackson’s last tour, but as mainstream erotica, it was effective.

This sequence wasn’t quite as much fun, however, as the Bollywood version of “Me Against the Music,” based around some well-choreographed group dancing, complete with Spears making mudras with her hands in a gorgeous green and gold harem pants ensemble. The night’s take on “Hot As Ice” was especially playful, with Spears serving as an assistant to “the Misfit of Magic,” Edward Alonzo. He even made her disappear.

One moment during the night did seem like a mistake. Spears disappeared several times during the set, to change costumes or allow her fellow performers a chance to show their skills. At one point, however, she didn’t seem to resurface. Her backing singers awkwardly stood center stage as her voice drifted forth, as if from beneath the stage. Maybe I just couldn’t see her from her my vantage point — the show is in the round, playing further on the image of the three-ring circus. But she seemed to miss her cue.

Despite that first-night stumble and several numbers in which her dancing was no more than adequate, Spears can safely call this performance a success. She apparently has no interest in proving herself as a vocalist; Pink is a better acrobat and her friend Justin Timberlake is a far better dancer.

But anyone who thinks her lackluster would do well to remember what she really is: a burlesque performer, a carny’s dream born a century or so too late to be fated to ply her art upon the midway, but able to fulfill the spectacle of blond ambition now.

Britney Spears grabs the rings in ‘Circus’