Games for Actors and Non-Actors is a handbook of methods, techniques, games, and exercises designed to help anyone - whether actor or non-actor - rehearse for real life: make the fictional real. Show More Show Less. Any Condition Any Condition. No ratings or reviews yet No ratings or reviews yet.
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Reprinted eight times. This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Preface to the second edition: The Royal Shakespeare Company, theatre in prisons and landless peasants Postscript — with pride in our hearts. Preface to the first edition: the fable of Xua-Xua, the prehuman woman who discovered theatre Postscript: actors and non-actors. Feminism in Godrano The police again The oppressed and the oppressors.
Introduction: a new system of exercises and games from Theatre of the Oppressed Two unities Five categories of game and exercise. Second series: walks 1 Slow motion 2 At a right angle 3 Crab 4 Crossed legs aka three-legged race 5 Monkey 6 All fours 7 Camel walk 8 Elephant walk 9 Kangaroo walk 10 Leaning-against-each-other walk 11 Strapped-feet walk 12 Wheelbarrow 13 As you like it 14 Imitating others.
Third series: massages 1 In a circle 2 The movement comes back 3 Sea waves 4 The rolling carpet 5 Back massage 6 The demon. Homage to Tex Avery — cat and dog s The handkerchief game aka the hat game, aka dog and bone Good day Cadavre exquis aka consequences The parachute Balance with an object. Fifth series: gravity 1 Horizontality sequence 2 Verticality sequence 3 Sequence of rectilinear and circular movements.
The imaginary journey The glass cobra One blind line, one sighted line The magnet — positive and negative Swedish multiple sculpture The vampire of Strasbourg The blind car What is the object? The mirrors sequence 1 The plain mirror 2 Subject and image swap roles 3 Subject—image, image—subject 4 Everyone joins hands. The two lines form a curve Symmetrical groups The mirror breaks Changing partners The distorting mirror The narcissistic mirror The rhythmic mirror Unification.
Image games 1 Complete the image 2 Ball games 3 Boxing match 4 One person we fear, one person is our protector 5 Furnish the empty space 6 Atmosphere of snow 7 Building character relations 8 Characters in movement 9 Observation 10 Complementary activities 11 What has changed? The invention of space and the spatial structures of power 1 Space and territory 2 Inventing the space in a room.
The great game of power Chairs in the empty space Where is my place? Six chairs Photographing the image. What do I want? Reconnecting memory, emotion and imagination 1 Memory: remembering yesterday 2 Memory and emotion: remembering a day in the past 3 Memory and emotion and imagination 4 Remembering an actual oppression 5 Rehearsal on the stage of the imagination 6 Extrapolation.
Image of the group Ritual gesture Ritual Rituals and masks The image of the hour The kinetic image The merry-go-round of images. New Image Theatre techniques: the cop in the head 1 Dissociation — thought, speech, action 2 The analytical image: the multiple mirror of how others see us 3 Somatisation 4 The circuit of rituals 5 The three wishes 6 The polyvalent image 7 The screen image 8 The image of the image.
Exercises with or without script 1 Improvisation 2 The dark room 3 One story told by several people 4 Change the story 5 One line spoken by several actors. Emotional warm-up exercises 1 Abstract emotion 2 Abstract emotion with animals 3 Abstract emotion, following the master 4 Animals or vegetables in emotional situations! Ideological warm-up 1 Dedication 2 Reading newspapers 3 The evocation of historic events 4 Lessons. Exercises for the preparation of a Forum Theatre model or for the rehearsal of other kinds of theatre 1 Play to the deaf 2 Stop!
Twenty fundamental topics 1 Oppression or aggression? Should they be simple or complex? Error or doubt? Who can replace whom? Can a forum change themes? When does a session of Theatre of the Oppressed end? Colombian hypnosis: one leader, one follower Colombian hypnosis: one leader, two followers Colombian hypnosis: one to one Colombian hypnosis: multiple version Colombian hypnosis Colombian hypnosis Minimum surface contact Minimum surface contact Pushing against each other: see-saw Pushing against each other: back to back Pushing against each other: hand to hand Pushing against each other, bottom to bottom Pushing against each other: final step The Greek exercise The Greek exercise The Greek exercise Slow motion race Crossed legs Machine of rhythms Machine of rhythms Dialogue of rhythms Dialogue of rhythms.
This is a conflation of two books, Stop! However, there is a continuous overlap and interplay between all these forms, and the choice of the particular form simply depends on the situation in which the work is being made and the goal of the theatrical event.
However, the image work never remains static — as with all of Theatre of the Oppressed, the frozen image is simply the starting point for or prelude to the action, which is revealed in the dynamisation process, the bringing to life of the images and the discovery of whatever direction or intention is innate in them.
The polysemy of images is a vital factor in this work; a group of individuals will perceive a whole range of different, but often intriguingly related, meanings within a single image, often seeing things which the sculptors had no idea were there. Images work across language and culture barriers and, as Boal shows, frequently reveal unexpected universalities.
Also, working with images, sculpting rather than talking, can be more democratic, as it does not privilege more verbally articulate people. This is theatre which does not take place in a theatre building or other obvious theatrical context, with an audience which does not know it is an audience.
In reaction to the incidents in the scene, the public becomes involved in an argument, usually aided by a couple of agents-provocateurs actors mingling with the public and expressing extreme and opposite reactions to the events of the scene.
Invisible Theatre is a way of using theatre to stimulate debate, getting people to question issues in a public forum. It asks questions without dictating the answers. This again is fundamental to Theatre of the Oppressed — it is never didactic to its audience, it involves a process of learning together rather. Forum Theatre is a theatrical game in which a problem is shown in an unsolved form, to which the audience, again spect-actors, is invited to suggest and enact solutions.
The problem is always the symptom of an oppression, and generally involves visible oppressors and a protagonist who is oppressed. In its purest form, both actors and spect-actors will be people who are victims of the oppression under consideration; that is why they are able to offer alternative solutions, because they themselves are personally acquainted with the oppression.
The game is a form of contest between spect-actors trying to bring the play to a different end in which the cycle of oppression is broken and actors ostensibly making every possible effort to bring it to its original end in which the oppressed is beaten and the oppressors are triumphant. This is a very simplified description of Forum Theatre — and, as befits a form of theatre which is now over twenty years old, there are many different manifestations of it in operation all over the world.
Having used Forum Theatre myself with a variety of different communities in Britain, I can testify to its efficacy, both as a way of using theatre to make sense of life and as a means of giving people the strength and confidence to overcome their oppressions. Theatrical truth, as shown in Theatre of the Oppressed work, need bear no relation to literal realism; if the oppressed see their oppressors as monsters, then it is monsters that we should show, even if this means developing a visual style more akin to expressionism than realism.
He himself zooms around the world, from Africa to Canada to Europe to Rio, teaching his methods and techniques and, to all appearances, seeming on every occasion to take as much joy in seeing a group work for the first time with an exercise he must have done some thousands of times before. One of the problems of translating the book has been actually discovering where Boal is in the world at any particular time, coupled with the vagaries of the international postal system.
When you take in this frenetic globetrotting, you start to understand that his ambitions for the Theatre of the Oppressed as a world-changing practice are no mere quixotism. It is this element of joy and enthusiasm, coupled with an immense and warm humanity, which I fear no translation could entirely convey. When watching him work, one is struck by his constant awareness and analysis of everything that is going on in the room. Impatience is rare, and emerges only when it is clear that the questioner has not listened to the answer or is not prepared to apply his or her own intellect to the work, or is looking for something more akin to paternal acceptance than knowledge of theatre and how it can help us understand and challenge the world we live in.
But Theatre of the Oppressed is Theatre of the Oppressed, its own animal, nothing else. Certain points of translation may need highlighting. The Joker figure is, in various different contexts and combinations, the director, referee, facilitator and workshop leader; in the context of Forum Theatre, the Joker is the person who acts as intermediary between audience and performers, and is attached to no one party — just as the Joker in a pack of cards belongs to no one suit but floats between them.
Other words are explained in context when necessary. Theatre of the Oppressed is about acting rather than talking, questioning rather than giving answers, analysing rather than accepting. This is a book for all those who are interested in theatre as a force for change. Adrian Jackson November Having practised Theatre of the Oppressed extensively with my own company, Cardboard Citizens, and in a wide variety of cultures and contexts, here and abroad, with Augusto and without him, I think I now understand both the work and the man better — but, happily, most of what I wrote above still seems to apply.
In a work that is about change and how to effect it, on a personal and political level, it might seem fair to ask what is now different about either the man or his work. What has changed? The work is better known now, that is for sure. Not that he has stood still — far from it. His energy is only minimally affected by his advancing age, as evidenced by his pioneering theatrical entrance within the last decade into fields ranging far and wide, from pyschotherapy to elected political office.
But the central informing ethos, which revolves around justice and injustice, remains rock solid. And in some respects, he has come full circle. Rereading the stories of his early experiments with Forum Theatre in Europe, the metaphor of the bench occupied by the squatting peasants after the Portuguese Revolution of Carnations pp.
Of course, there may only be so many oppressions. There is a poignancy when you analyse the exercises alongside the nowpublished life. And of course now he is working again with the peasants in Brazil the feudal designation still seems applicable. Certain powerful elements recur: the use of others to see ourselves, the projections others put onto us, the insistence that we experiment with adopting these projections, the better to understand our possibilities.
The roots of the techniques remain the same, but the motivations have developed — originally more political, now unashamedly personal at the same time. These are lifelong points of reference, for obvious reasons: Hamlet, the container of all human possibilities, the personification of the struggle between action and inaction, the meeting point of the personal and the political; Antigone, in her passionate struggle for justice, one woman ranged.
Other references and uses of language contain their own clues. The Portuguese words that send me scurrying to the dictionary sometimes even in English! So how has Boal himself changed? Now he is a regular visitor to New York and Omaha, he is married to a pyschoanalyst, as well as inventing a whole school of work using drama as therapy. Though the world has not changed as much as he would like it to have, his humanity is apparently more generous and self-assured, even though the animus informing it still burns with a undiminished sense of outrage.
Adrian Jackson, November AJackson aol. The first was in Stratford-upon-Avon in Cicely Berry and Adrian Noble invited me to lead a workshop with the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company to investigate the possibilities of using the introspective techniques of The Rainbow of Desire to create Shakespearian characters — in this case, those of Hamlet.
Having been away from professional theatre for more than ten years — during which I had worked intensely with groups from slums, trade unions, and churches, and with other poor people who were using theatre as a means to understand their own problems and to try to find their own solutions, rather than investigating those issues just in relation to the characters in a play!
Directing plays is like cycling or horse-riding: you never forget. From the very first day, I felt at home talking to professionals like myself, people who were, again like Cicely and myself, totally open minded and open hearted in relation to the new experience and experiment we were undertaking.
When, in the early s, after working decades mostly with professional actors, I first found myself facing a group of Peruvian indigenous people who had come from small villages and hamlets, not speaking my language, and probably distrusting me as they would distrust a Strange Creature and I am sure they were right! Did I treat them like something that in reality they were not? Not at all: I merely took them for what they really were — indigenous people in Peru, actors at Stratford, peasants in India: they are all, like me, just human beings.
We dress differently, have different habits, we invent our own music, our own cuisine — but we cannot live only with what we ourselves have created, we must incorporate others, sometimes in the manner of the anthropophagic Brazilian literature at the start of the twentieth century!
We cannot live in isolation, under arrest inside ourselves. Precisely because of that, we can learn from each other: we are different, being the same. When Sanjoy Ganguly invited me to work with his peasant actors of Jana Sanskriti in Calcutta, I imagined that they wanted me to teach them new techniques to rehearse Forum Theatre, to help them improve the making of their shows, something they already did wonderfully well.
Now we want Rainbow of Desire, because we also want to discover our inner selves, our intimate feelings. We have fears and frustrations, hopes and desires — we want to better understand that, too! We simply did theatre!
At the RSC we did the same. In this book, besides many completely new exercises and games, I have added all the variations that I introduced in some of the existing techniques, so as to make them more useful for professional actors working on a professional production. To make those variations more readable, I called them Hamlet — a word you will find often in this. Of course they can be used in any kind of play, not being exclusive to Shakespeare.
The protagonist, in the way we usually do it, can see each one of those images fighting with the antagonist. In the play Hamlet, there is a scene in which the protagonist confronts Gertrude, his mother.
His different desires towards her include, obviously, filial love, sexual love, jealousy, admiration, fear, and many others. The actor shows with his own body the images he is able to create of those feelings, and those images are taken over by other actors; those actors will then improvise each one against Gertrude, alone. In this new Variation, after seeing this procession of re-improvisations, the actor playing Hamlet must go and impersonate all those images himself, one by one, and re-improvise all those desires, emotions, sentiments and situations.
He has to feel how he would have felt if he were only this urge or that desire, this particular will or that single emotion: like the painter who has a palette of pure colours before he mixes them the way he pleases. The actor has to not only understand and feel his character, but must be able to deliver it to an audience in artistic form, as an artist.
For anyone, doing this technique for personal purposes, it can be enough to learn, to know, to understand; for the actor, however, it is imperative to show — so he must feel all those steps, inside himself, to be able show them outside, to the audience. As for the rehearsal techniques, some new ones were tested at the RSC, alongside the traditional ones. I remember with joy one moment in which the 30 actors that had been working with me for two weeks were presenting a summary of our work to their colleagues, as well as the directors and administrative personnel.
This is meant to unbalance the actors and, by forcing them to answer immediately, in crisis, they have to investigate, to get to the root of the part, to create knowledge and motivation for the characters they are playing. I was aware that the actors in the audience, not having participated in the workshop, would be more than willing, in a very friendly and cooperative way of. What crimes?
During the wars, soldiers inevitably commit many crimes. I was the King, so I took on their crimes, because they were my responsibility. Yes, in order to use those techniques, actors must be good, creative and imaginative. Oh, yes! This poses us a totally new problem: we are working with partners with whom we have no solidarity regarding the crimes they have committed, even though we strongly support their desire to invent a new future for themselves.
Everything which is forbidden outside the prisons is common practice inside them, provided the prisoner has the money to pay for it: drugs, robbery, sexual violence, prostitution, gang fights, torture and murder. Hamlet, I. Prisons in Brazil are mostly like repositories of humans, who stay there doing nothing — which is like having a hospital and slinging sick people into it together, without doctor, nurse, or even medicine: how could we expect the sick to be healed in such a scenario?
Our prisons are factories of hatred. In the first stages of this project, we have discovered the obvious: inmates are imprisoned in space, but free in time — we, on the contrary, are mostly free in space but confined in time. What can they do with their free time? Theatre of the Oppressed creates spaces of liberty where people can free their memories, emotions, imaginations, thinking of their past, in the present, and where they can invent their future instead of waiting for it.
How to create spaces of liberty inside the walls of a prison? Prisoners have the freedom to analyse their past, for sure; and to invent their distant future, why not? Here resides the greatest problem: their present is their confrontation with their powerful enemy, the guards, who also consider themselves to be oppressed. Both sides have their parti pris; each regard the other as their enemy.
Just like when I worked with Protestants and Catholics in Derry, Northern Ireland — their parti pris, apparently, was religion, history, but they had, both sides, families, partners, personal problems and anxieties.
To see people without captions! That is what we are beginning to do now: not to see, in the prisoner, the jailed man or, in the guard, the man in uniform.
To see both for what they are, before those qualifications are pinned on them: they are people. We are trying to work on themes that are common to both sides, mostly personal problems, which they can share. In the morning, the prison guards presented their piece, which showed the difficulty of their work in the overcrowded prisons, and the poor remuneration and the ever-present danger which accompanies their calling.
As is always the case with our theatrical method, the guards themselves played all the parts — even those of the prisoners, for which they donned the uniforms of the sentenced men, as well as adopting their physical stances — the head lowered, the hand on the shoulder of the man in front. That evening came the culmination: the women prisoners staged the moment when one of their number, Amanda there telling her own true story , was separated from her six-month-old baby, a child conceived in prison — a parting which the law ordained.
In Theatre of the Oppressed, reality is shown not only as it is, but also, more importantly, as it could be. Which is what we live for — to become what we have the potential to be. This vital element is entrusted to the creativity of the audience: the spectators come on stage, substituting themselves for the protagonist, and trying to find viable solutions for real problems.
Though one and the same person, the latter should not have to pay for the sins of the former. When the theatrical element of the event was over, the paulista authorities, representatives of the three bodies involved, were unanimous in their speeches, proclaiming the necessity of continuing this Theatre of the Oppressed project in the prisons, with the objective of humanising the relations between these two constituencies, compelled by circumstance to a daily coexistence, in spite of their diametrical differences.
Then came the farewells. With tenderness, we embraced these prisoners, male and female, and their guards and support staff — people who had made us laugh and cry, as they performed their stories, their hopes, that day.
The time for goodbyes. In the ample auditorium of the Memorial, seven armed soldiers went on stage, and each prisoner gave his arm to his guard, and they set off for the bus that would take them back to their cells. They are people. The recognition that the other is also a man, a woman, a human being. Like that sad mother whom the law obliged to separate from her little one; like that father, the unsuspected actor, who so moved his little girl.
Millions of peasants have no land to cultivate while millions of acres remain arid and useless, with the owners waiting for the government to build a highway near them, so that prices will soar. The land is kept unproductive and useless, like bars of gold in the vaults of a bank. The MST, a non-violent organisation, occupies only such deserted properties and it cultivates them.
Its members never occupy a productive area; they never invade a living farm. One tactic is to try to make the reality of their lives clear to the entire population, to gather sympathy for their cause; the newspapers and the TV stations almost never give space to them.
At the beginning of , they approached us with the following question in mind: how can we use theatre to make our efforts and our needs more widely known? They certainly have problems. The police treat them with inhuman violence; when they are arrested, policemen maltreat their wives and their families; in court, not infrequently, they meet judges who are friends of the landowners but no friends of justice; in the government, they meet slow bureaucrats.
We started off working in the normal way: exercises, games, Image and Forum Theatre. MST is made up of wonderful people, but they are also like us, they have the same qualities and the same inadequacies. Theatre of the Oppressed was created to serve people — rather than people being there to serve Theatre of the Oppressed. There was no sense in analysing the oppressors to try to find out if they had some decent qualities, if they were good grandfathers to their grandchildren.
A dictator is a dictator, even if he says his prayers at night, kneeling on straw. The Forum was the search for alternatives to try to find concrete solutions because everything else was already understood and accepted as true. Later, we started to find situations where oppression was not so clear cut, yet both parties claimed to be oppressed: inside a couple, among friends, parents and children, teachers and pupils.
In these particular cases,. Why did I do this? Because, by showing himself as a nice gentle old man in front of the whole village, that man signed a contract with the entire population to be nice and gentle from that moment on!
Mado le Pennec in Brittany has worked with government employees who are supposed to help the people with their problems. That is what they are supposed to do, but, tired of the monotony, most of them mistreat the people when they come to seek help.
In doing Theatre of the Oppressed with the people seeking their help, the social workers abandon their authoritarian posture and assume a more human one. Creative heresy! There are however some unacceptable deviations — not adaptations of the mechanisms of Theatre of the Oppressed to special conditions and local problems, but total treason to the philosophical basis of this form of theatre, which must be Theatre about, to and above all of the Oppressed. This deviation is the same as using the music of Wagner to stimulate workers to build trucks more quickly, or Debussy to encourage computer software workers to be more meticulous in their handling of the delicate components.
Wagner and Debussy are not responsible for that. Neither am I! Soon we understood that Forum was not enough to deal with those questions because it is in the nature of Forum to work on objective, visible, well-known oppressions — this made us try out other forms of Theatre of the Oppressed, other possible theatrical structures that could help us to understand more complex situations, no longer just those considered well known and obvious to all, as was the case at first with Forum.
So, one by one, the introspective techniques came into being. Even so, it contains a few embryos of those more internal techniques.
This book is a practical introduction to all the forms of Theatre of the Oppressed. All these forms are complementary, because human beings are complex and not so easy to understand as we would like them to be. The best way of using them is to use them all. One day. This will never happen, I know.
The role of utopias is not to be reached: it is to stimulate us to try harder and go further. To be able to dream is already a dream come true!
Which theatre do we mean? First of all, theatre is a place: a building, any kind of construction specifically designed to house shows, plays, theatrical presentations. Theatre can also be the repetitive acts of our everyday lives.
We perform the play of breakfast, the scene of going to work, the act of working, the epilogue of supper, the epic of Sunday lunch with the family, etc.
Life can become a series of mechanisations, as rigid and as lifeless as the movements of a machine. In this context, theatre and lies are synonymous. But in its most essential sense, theatre is the capacity possessed by human beings — and not by animals — to observe themselves in action. Humans are capable of. They can see themselves here and imagine themselves there; they can see themselves today and imagine themselves tomorrow. This is why humans are able to identify, rather than merely recognise, themselves and others.
A cat recognises its master, who gives it food and strokes it, but cannot identify him as a teacher, a professional person, a lover. To identify is to be able not only to recognise within the same repetitive context but also to extrapolate to other contexts; to see beyond what the eye sees, to hear beyond what the ear hears, to feel beyond what touches the skin, to think beyond what words mean. I can identify a friend by a single gesture, a painter by his style, a politician by the policies he supports.
Even in the absence of the subject, I can identify his mark, his traces, his actions, his merits. According to this old tale,5 it was a woman — not a man! Men merely embezzled this wonderful art and, periodically through the ages, excluded women from the role of actor and sometimes even that of spectator.
Women discovered the art, and men invented its artifices — buildings, plays, acting. Xua-Xua lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, when pre-women and premen wandered from mountain to valley, from land to sea, killing other animals to feed themselves, eating leaves and fruits from trees, drinking water from rivers, sheltering in caves among the rocks. These times were long before the arrival of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, long before Homo sapiens and Homo habilis, who were already almost human in their physical appearance, in the weight of their brains, and in their cruelty.
These pre-human beings lived in hordes, the better to defend themselves. Naturally they were attracted to one another; they liked swimming together, climbing trees and mountains together, they liked to smell and lick each. It was good to be with one another. They were happy, as happy as two prehuman people could be. One day, Xua-Xua felt her body becoming different.
Her belly was growing and growing. They kept their distance from one another. Xua-Xua liked to stay alone, watching her belly; Li-Peng went off in pursuit of other females, but could find no one like his original female. Xua-Xua felt her belly moving; when she was on the point of falling asleep, her belly would shift from right to left, from left to right.
As time went by, her belly grew bigger and bigger, and moved more and more. Like a well-behaved member of the audience, Li-Peng simply looked on from afar, very sad and very afraid.
He watched without acting, spectator to her incomprehensible actions. Did his body stop at his skin? At the amniotic fluid in which he was floating? Was that the world?
He, his mother and the world were one single unity, he was they and they were he. This is why, even today, when we immerse our naked bodies in water in our bathtubs, in the swimming pool, or the sea, we feel again those primal sensations and we merge our bodies with the whole world, Mother Earth.
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Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Augusto Boal. Publisher: Routledge , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title The French edition of Jeux pour Acteurs et Non-Acteurs published in is currently in its seventh edition. Follow two masters who metamorphose into each other. Collective creation of a mask. Minimum surface contact.
Pushing against each other. Pushing against each other bottom to bottom. The Greek exercise. Divide up the movement. At a right angle 3 Crab 4 Crossed legs aka threelegged race.
In a circle 2 The movement comes back 3 Sea waves. The rolling carpet. The bear of Poitiers 3 The chair. Leapfrog 5 The Brueghel game. Stick in the mud 7 Grandmothers footsteps 8 Millipede. Apple dance 10 Sticky paper 11 The wooden sword of Paris. American football aka British bulldog 13 Three Irish duels.
Little packets 15 Cat and mouse. Homage to Tex Avery cat and dogs. Horizontality sequence. Verticality sequence. Sequence of rectilinear and circular movements. Game of rhythm and movement. The machine of rhythms. Machine of rhythms. The Peruvian ball game. The clapping series.
West Side Story. The Portuguese rhythmic shoes. The four brooms. Rhythm dialogue in teams. Dialogue of rhythms. Bolivian mimosas. How many As in a single A? Lying on their backs on tables. The imaginary journey. The glass cobra. The magnet positive and negative.
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